The Jock and Me
by xXSoldierXx
Summary: REWRITTEN/REVISED in 2012. AU high school fic. Beach parties, chick fights, pep rallies, bonfires, UST, and sports cars. Sakura is a sophomore transfer student to the affluent Konoha High. She meets Sasuke, a standoffish, popular, intellectual upperclassman and total jock and realizes she may have friends among enemies. Pairings: SasuSaku, slight KibaSaku. Mature content and OOC
1. The First Day

**A/N: REVISED TJAM CH 1. Hello, everyone! Thanks so much for picking this humble high school fic! Just an FYI, I originally published this story in 2007. I must have been about thirteen, but I'm a college student now, and I felt I really owed it to you as well as myself to go back and improve the quality for your enjoyment. The basics are unchanged—characters and story are all basically the same. Overall, everything is much improved! Please enjoy!**

* * *

My name is Haruno Sakura.

I'm the president of the graduating class of Konoha High School, captain of the cheerleading squad, straight-A science nerd extraordinaire, and I'm dating the hottest guy in school. I know what you're thinking—not bad, Haruno! Not bad at all. But I swear on my Mustang that I didn't always have it this good. For that matter, I didn't always have a _Mustang_.

They say that when you say a person's name, you breathe life into them. If that were true, I should be dead. Three years ago, if you _ever_ heard my name around the halls of KHS, there was almost always an unceremonious forehead joke attached, or a jab at my hair color, a rude comment on my outfit. Looking back now, it's a wonder I didn't just _vaporize_ from sheer unpopularity.

You're not so sure what to think of me now, are you? I'm not going to make excuses. The preps hated me; the jocks hated me; it seems like even the nerds were afraid I'd cramp their style—

But wait. I'm getting ahead of myself, so let me just say this: the moral of the story is that you _are_ beautiful, no matter what they say. And no, I'm not talking about that sappy Christina Aguilera song.

Just sit right there. I'll tell you my story, and then I think you'll understand.

* * *

**2 YEARS EARLIER.**

"Try to look more excited, Sakura," Mom pled, rolling to a stop at a busy intersection.

I glanced at her in my peripherals, trying to decide if I was more interested in her small talk or my empty text inbox—three days in a new city, a new house, now a new school, and not a single message from my "friends" back at Maru High. I was beginning to feel jilted.

Pointedly ignoring my mother's request, I deepened my scowl and faced out the window to obsess in peace over the legitimacy of my relationships. This led to a mental dissection of my entire _existence_, which led to a flurry of inner-declarations and self-made promises to run away and make it big as a movie star. _Yeah_, then people would like me—or maybe not. I'd become the public figure for hate forums all over the world.

Did I have real friends? Maybe. Did they even miss me? Probably not. Had my parents really just finalized their divorce? You bet your ass they did.

My dejection, by that point, must have really shown on my face, because Mom suddenly reached across the cab and wrapped my wrist in her slender fingers. "I'm begging you, please don't be sad, sweetie," she said. "I know it's hard to start things fresh, but it could be a great opportunity to reinvent yourself, you know? Make new friends, take up new hobbies… Maybe meet a cute boy—"

"Mom!"

"I'm _just_ saying, sweetie." She affectionately patted my wrist. "Whatever you decide, just remember to embrace it. Half the battle is keeping an open mind."

"Oh, I _know_," I countered, snatching my hand back and shooting up in the passenger seat. "Not that _you_ have room to talk."

Mom made a small sound, something like gut-wrenching agony as I plunged my dagger deep into her windpipe. I immediately felt sorry for the pain and guilt on her face when she looked at me, but to her credit, she made quick work of pasting on a mommy smile and acting like everything was okay. The sadness remained in those big doe eyes, though, the same color jade as mine, taunting me. Suddenly I felt like the scum of the earth.

"Sorry, Mom," I murmured, shamefully averting my gaze. "That wasn't what I wanted to say."

There was a lot of tension in the car after that, but it was mostly mine. Mom drove me to school in silence, while I squirmed in the passenger seat, restlessly fiddling with my book bag straps and the outdated radio controls. "You'd better stop that, before you break it," Mom finally said, and I couldn't help but smile a little when I knew she'd forgiven me. I still continued to restlessly twist the knobs, never quite satisfied with the sounds that filled the car, but Mom put a stop to my incessant fidgeting when we pulled into the Konoha High School parking lot. "First day of school!" she cheered again, like a peppy tour guide, and she made a grandeur gesture at the behemoth that was KHS.

"Holy _crap_—you said it was a _high school_, not the freaking Playboy Mansion!" I exclaimed, sinking deeper into the passenger seat. The vinyl made obnoxious fart sounds beneath my weight, and I became suddenly hyperaware that we were idling in my Mom's old lemon—a rusty four-door affair with the ugliest hubcaps you've ever seen—surrounded on all sides by Aston Martins, Bentleys, Ferraris and Bugattis.

"It's your first day at your new high school. If you keep scowling like that—"

"_What_?" I snapped. "My face will get stuck?"

"_Relax_, Sakura! It'll be alright!"

Sure, everything would be alright. If she'd said that five minutes ago, I might have even believed her. But this was the first time I'd seen the massive Gothic-Tudor style revival, with its triple-tiered fountain, French brick and limestone, and I already felt like a pauper in Cinderella's palace. I couldn't believe I'd let Mom chauffeur me to the ball in her Impala.

"Let's just get this over with," I muttered, resigned to my utter humiliation. KHS was the band aid and I was going to rip it off—assuming I could get out of the damned car first. I wrestled with the door—it had a tendency to stick—and gave it a good shove before it finally flew open, nearly hitting a girl who had the bad timing to walk by. She screamed and dropped her latte all over the sidewalk, the commotion attracting the curious stares of nearby students by the time I'd stumbled out of the cab and tripped over my book bag.

_Oh God, please stop looking at me, _I thought, bowing my head to hide behind a curtain of my hair. I was blushing from my face to my collarbones when I ducked under the window, muttering an insincere apology to that girl with the latte and shooting my mom a desperate look. "_Please_ get here on time. I'll be the girl with the paper bag over her head."

"Oh, shoot." Mom paused. I felt my eyes get wide.

"Momwhatisit?" I blurted, pushing the words together. I felt my heart drop like a rock into my churning stomach.

"I'm _sorry_, dear," Mom said, very carefully, very slowly. My eyes got rounder, and she seemed to deliberate her next words as if her life depended on them. "I'm working _really_ late tonight. You're going to have to take the bus home."

"NO!" I shrieked. More faces turned my way, and I immediately clapped a hand over my mouth. "_Mom_," I hissed. "_Please don't make me_!"

"I'm _sorry_, Sakura. I really am, but just do us both a favor and look at it as a learning experience. Meet some new people. Make a few friends." She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and jerked her head towards the school. When I didn't budge, she sighed and gave a shrug. "Things are going to be awkward for a little while, okay? Just hang in there until we can unpack all the boxes and get our accounts in order. If you keep the melodrama to a minimum, _maybe_ I'll think about buying you a car, sound good?"

I must have been grinning from ear to ear then, because Mom rolled her eyes and started shooing me towards the door. "You've got yourself a deal," I told her, grabbing my pack off the pavement and discreetly blowing Mom a kiss. When she drove away, I took a minute to peer around the sea of student-owned cars, trying to block out the sounds of the jocks and the gossips already whispering about the girl with the "crazy hair and big forehead."

Mom had better have one hell of a down payment.

* * *

I wish I could say just the _thought_ of going in didn't have me about to piss myself in fear, but the longer I stood staring down the doors, the more I felt like I needed a toilet.

People were gathered around the front entrance, mostly bouncing babes flirting with the meatheads, and the campus was buzzing with conversation. As I worked up the nerve to start towards the doors, I saw that the crowds were already splitting up into cliques. The cheerleaders—the stereotypical kind, unfortunately; not like the peppy, sweet girls with the cheek tattoos from Maru High—were dressed in full uniform, tiny red and white pleated skirts and midriff tops that just barely held their boobs in. These were the preps of KHS—the _bitches_—tall, skinny, god-complex.

Intermingled with the cheerleaders were the jocks, a rolling wave of Varsity letterman jackets, sagging pants, and designer boxer shorts. The cheerleaders hung on them like horny monkeys, and behind them were all the wannabes. Need I explain? They follow the populars around, squeeze themselves into the in-crowd and get pushed back out again—emotional punching bags for the wicked.

I wished at that moment that I could have belonged _somewhere_—preferably with the norms. I don't care what anybody says about how great the populars are—the norms are untouchable. They can be themselves, say what they want, do what they want, wear what they want, and no one passes judgment on them. To be normal: truly my greatest wet dream, come true.

As it were, from where I stood, pocket-protectors, square-framed glasses, acne and phlegm buildup for miles. Yes, my friend, you read that right. I really could _see _the phlegm.

By the time I'd let the crowd jostle me up to the front entrance, I was already formulating a plan of retreat—get my schedule, find my locker, hide in the shadows and read a text book or something—but as I was marking off my mental checklist, I felt the pavement become ceramic tiling underneath my feet.

I glanced up, suddenly assaulted by a blast of cool, ventilated air. My God, it was like _nothing_ I'd ever seen. I had to remind myself to keep moving when I made it through the vestibule into the rotunda, my mouth agape at the sight of the high, rounded ceiling, regal wrought iron double staircase, Persian rugs and brass door fixtures. Slap a label on a _ball room_ and call it a high school lobby, why don't you? There wasn't a single student-decorated bulletin board in sight—only modern art, water features, busts, and fruit bowls on Roman art-deco pedestals.

When exactly had I fallen down the rabbit hole?—or maybe it was the Pantheon?

First as of entering, students broke off left and right, some up the stairs, others down the several corridors leading out of the great foyer—"lobby" didn't seem to do the place justice. As students commuted instinctively to their lockers or on to class, I wandered aimlessly down halls, finding no apparent rhyme or reason to the layout of the school. There were freshman next to juniors, seniors next to sophomores at their white and red lockers—the only familiar high school paraphernalia that really seemed to cheapen the ambience of the place.

Still, I was rather relieved they weren't made out of marble, at least.

I found the office after _much_ ado. I don't know what's so amusing about tossing a football around in a crowded hallway, especially with so many breakables around, but when I thought I could slip right through a flurry of pouncing, howling jocks, I ended up with a pigskin Wilson in my face. I didn't even scream on impact. The thing hit me square in the forehead, and I crashed to the tile, flat on my ass.

"My bad!" someone yelled.

My bad?_ Is that supposed to pass for an _apology_ around here?_ Despite myself, I threw my head back and howled with delirious laughter, feeling the hallway open up around me as people gave the crazy girl with pink hair a wide berth. _Yeah, that's right. Keep your distance._

"Damn, Inuzuka, I think you broke her."

I felt a hand between my shoulder blades, heavy and _deliciously_ warm, and when the last of my delirious whimpers subsided, I slowly opened my eyes. "Hey, you okay?" I felt my cheeks flush hot when a boy with spiky brown hair brushed the hair back from my forehead. I couldn't even bring myself to care that he was drawing attention to my billboard brow. He was _handsome_, with peculiar slit irises and red triangles smeared in football eye black on either cheek. When he met my eyes, I swear my jittery heart jumped into my throat. "You okay?" he repeated, and I nodded stiffly, not trusting my voice to speak.

When he offered me his hand, I stared at him like he'd grown another head. I was half out of my mind with confusion when I took in the stylish jeans, designer shoes and Varsity jacket. This guy was a _jock_. "Come on," he coaxed, insistently wiggling his fingers at me, flashing me a sexy pirate smile and pearly white canines. "I swear I don't bite."

"That's a shame," I muttered.

"What was that?"

"Oh, nothing!" I pushed a hand through my hair, slowly letting it come to rest on the back of my neck as I dissolved into more nervous laughter. He looked taken aback then, as if afraid I'd have another episodic fit of giggles in the middle of the hallway. I let my humiliation immediately sober my nerves and reluctantly placed my hand in his, marveling at how considerably effortless it was for him to pull me to my feet. _Oh, God, r__eally strong, too, _I thought, quickly brushing myself off with one hand while he enthusiastically shook the other.

"Sorry for nailing you in the forehead," he said. "My name's Kiba, by the way. What's that they always say in the movies? Know the name of your attacker, something like that? Ha-ha…."

Dear God, an awkward jock—was this boy made just for me? I sheepishly fidgeted with the hem of my tank top, eyes moving slowly down to our still-clasped hands. When Kiba realized what he was doing, he softly yelped and pulled away. "Nice to meet you, Kiba," I said, and he blushed before bending down to pick up my bag. "I'm Sakura," I added. "And I'm really lost."

* * *

Meeting Kiba turned out to be the highlight of my morning. He insisted on carrying my book bag for me and led me straight to the office.

It, too, was a picture from the Royal Palace, or maybe the White House, looking like the Oval Office with huge bay windows, a couple plush sofas, and a cherry wood reception desk. I met the kind lady manning the computer, a woman with short black hair who simply went by "Shizune" and nothing else. She presented me with a map of the school and a schedule, some paperwork for my teachers, and a combination for my locker, which Kiba led me to effortlessly.

"This is it," he confirmed and smiled softly at me. "I'm locker 336 if you need a friend. Not going to sugarcoat it for you, kiddo. This school can be pretty brutal."

I returned his smile, already having a bit of an idea. "You sound like an expert, yeah?" I began to load my nonessentials into my locker, dropping some notebooks into my bag for some of my classes throughout the day—AP Literature, Chemistry, Bio, Health, History, all good stuff.

"Well…." Kiba grinned. "I survived my freshman year."

"I'm a sophomore," I corrected him, and this seemed to give him pause.

For a second, I could have sworn the lights got dimmer, and Kiba looked at me for the poor, unfortunate soul that I was. "I'm _so_ sorry for you," he said gravely. "I really am, Haruno. You know, sophomore year has got to be the honest-to-God _worst_ part of KHS. Especially because…" His eyes trailed over to a little crowd at the end of the hallway. A group of wannabes and cheerleaders stood around a girl with a long blonde ponytail, the big, bold CAPTAIN in red letters on her windbreaker an obvious indicator that she was cheer royalty. "…Yamanaka Ino is a sophomore, too."

I shot him a questioning look.

"She's a bitch. But you didn't hear it from me."

I tried not to laugh at that but failed to hold it in. "My lips are sealed," I told him, dragging an imaginary zipper across my mouth. His lips twitched up in an appreciative smirk, and he gestured for me to follow him as he took my schedule from my hands.

"So you're not a freshman, and you're not a sophomore," I started. "Are you in your third or fourth year?"

"I'm a junior," Kiba answered, looking up from my schedule to flash me another one of those swoon-inducing smiles. "Yeah, that's right. You get one more awesome year of the Kiba." I felt my heart wiggle into my throat again and nodded fervently in reply. _An older man—not bad at all_.

He dropped me off outside of my first period class. I thanked him and nodded like a bobble head when he asked me if I'd eat with him at lunch.

In parting, Kiba advised me to watch out for Mr. Gai—my first period instructor—because he could be "youthfully intimidating" to a "shy girl" like me. When I'd asked him what he'd meant by that, he'd only pulled a face and excused himself before I could weasel anymore out of him. After that, I was too nervous to go inside. I just idled by myself until more students began to arrive, walking past me into Mr. Gai's room without so much as a passing glance.

I was okay with that. I'd rather be invisible than a target.

It was coming up on the bell when I finally forced myself to go in. The room was more like a college lecture hall than any of the high school classrooms I'd ever been in, so when I sheepishly scuffled up to the front desk, all eyes bore down on me like vicious sunrays through a magnifying glass. I was just the meager little ant. I felt utterly exposed, and I was forced to stand there for another five minutes while the class waited for Mr. Gai to arrive.

Right as the bell rang, a tall, skinny man with a bowl-cut came running in, pumping his fists and breathing like he'd just run a freaking marathon. "Good morning!" he bellowed, his shiny black hair bouncing up and down on his forehead as he jogged in place. Mr. Gai was dressed in a green track suit with a stop watch hanging from orange cord around his neck. I guessed him to double as the physical education teacher, since I knew I certainly didn't have _gym. _I refused to believe Kiba had taken me to the wrong place, either. "I was running a bit behind on my morning jog around the school! I only had time for seventy laps this morning!"

"Seventy?" I pipped, and Mr. Gai whipped his head around to look at me. The whole class fell silent and I froze, my whole body going suddenly very still. I don't know if I thought Mr. Gai was a bear or a wolf or what, but he gave the immediate impression of _no sudden movements_.

Mr. Gai looked me up and down, from my pink hair to my jean shorts to my Converse All-Stars. By his silence, I started to wonder if I'd violated some kind of dress code, but then he slapped me on the back, and I pitched forward onto his desk. "Welcome, Ms. Haruno!" he exclaimed. "I've been looking forward to this, our day of meeting!" I hadn't been expecting him to yell so loudly, nearly jumping out of my shoes when he continued to scream in my ear, "You're looking mighty youthful, young friend! How do you like Konoha High School?"

"Um…I…." I righted myself and sheepishly tried to put my hair back in order, my cheeks burning furiously under the stares of all my classmates. I could hear some high-pitched giggles from above and squeezed my book bag like a teddy bear, glancing longingly at the door. Kiba had been right. Kiba had been _so_ right. "Okay, I think. I'm going to do my best."

Mr. Gai seemed to really like my answer, as he flashed me a sparkly, toothy grin and gave me a huge thumbs-up. "Excellent! That's the spirit! Allow me to sign your necessary paperwork, and then take a seat wherever you like!"

I did as Mr. Gai said, and class began as soon as my butt found a chair. Even given the space of the huge room, there weren't that many students, so there were plenty of spots to choose from, and I chose one near to center. It wasn't a bad seat in terms of vantage, and when I had a look around, I even saw that the allegedly bitchy Ino was chatting absently and blowing bubbles down in front row. She was flanked on either side by a wannabe and another cheerleader, and I wondered briefly if she had a single class in which someone _didn't_ want to kiss her ass.

I pulled out my diary to keep my mind off of the High School Terrors, a soft pastel pink with a gold heart-shaped lock. I couldn't have passed it off for a notebook even if I'd tried, but its design reached a plain of obviousness that was so literally overt, it was covert. Any person could look at me scribbling in the book and not immediately assume I was writing in my diary. _This_ I've always found to be the most important attribute of a personal journal, as seriously as I took its purpose.

Seeing Ino pull her own diary out gave me a _whole_ new appreciation for this. It was hot-pink and fuzzy. She even had a pen to match.

I shook my head in disdain before flipping open to a blank page and jotting down some info.

* * *

**Name: **Inuzuka Kiba  
**Date of Birth: **July 7/** Age: **17-years-old  
**High School Year: **Junior /** Classification: **Jock / popular / norm  
**Notes: **Pretty cute; super nice; POTENTIAL ALLY! Remarkably amiable despite jock status. Fullback for KHS football team.

* * *

Later that day, I made a couple new friends, courtesy of Kiba.

Hyuuga Hinata was a timid girl from my class, just turned sixteen with an incredible generous streak that I was sure lesser people took advantage of. I felt bonded to her out of our mutual want to fly under the radar—something that we were both uncannily good at without even having to try.

She was easily the nicest person I'd met all day, next to Kiba, putting her number in my phone with an offer to do homework together if I ever needed a study buddy. It was through the Inuzuka that I'd learned Hinata was considered a geek by many of her peers—a misnomer I gathered was synonymous with "shy" and, more like one would expect, "studious."

Try as I might, past the timid veneer and nervous stutter, I couldn't find a single thing wrong with the pixie-like raven-haired girl. Hinata was truly one of the coolest people _I'd_ ever met.

By contrast, their buddy Aburame Shino deserved every facet of the title "geek." I guess you might say he's pretty cool in his _own_ way, but he's one hell of a bug freak—to the point that it's…well, it's disgusting, frankly, to someone like me who can't stand even butterflies being anywhere near my body. I was paired with him in a Bio lab and he nearly flipped his lid over the termites, so I gladly let him take the reins on our pheromone experiment.

It was after that creepy debacle that I had to give Kiba some serious credit. He was an atypical jock—totally popular, _way_ hot, and yet he spent all of his time with people like Shino—people like Hinata—more surprisingly, people like _me_. What's more is that he seemed to do it _willingly—_otherwise he was one hell of an actor. I told him this in the hallway as he was walking me to class, and he looked at me a little sideways, his head cocked curiously.

"People like you?" he repeated, mouth slowly tugging up on one side. "Sakura, you're a _person_. When I look at you, I don't see a geek or a norm or whatever the hell this clique shit is that you've been going on about. I like you because you're cute and you're funny, and you're probably the nicest girl _I've_ ever met." I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling at that, but there was no hiding the blush that crept of its own accord into my face. Kiba brought his hand up between us, hesitating a fraction of a second before moving to push a lock of hair from my cheek. At the sensation of his knuckle brushing my skin, I felt a budding warmth in my stomach. "Trust me, there are a lot of people at KHS who are gonna judge you," Kiba said. "But I promise you that _I_ won't be one of them."

* * *

**Name:** Hyuuga Hinata  
**Date of Birth:** December 27 / **Age:** 16  
**High School Year:** Sophomore / **Classification:** Geek / norm  
**Notes:** Shy, studious, selfless; incredibly _awesome_—perhaps the nicest person I have ever met. Go to for homework help.

* * *

**Name:** Aburame Shino  
**Date of Birth:** January 23 / **Age:** 17  
**High School Year:** Junior / **Classification:** Geek  
**Notes:** A total bug freak; really creepy and _eerily_ quiet; got some kind of weird Lennon-complex going on with those nerdy little sunglasses.

* * *

It wasn't just meeting Hinata and Shino that really brightened up my day—and please note the sarcasm when I say this—but my day got ten times better when I met the legendary Über Jock in Chemistry class.

Mr. Shiranui hadn't been quite as flamboyant as Mr. Gai when I introduced myself and got my papers signed, but he had humbly expressed his pleasure at having me—in a rather normal, inside volume level, thank-you-very-much—before telling me to find a partner for that day's chemical lab. Shino was the only person I knew, but I had no right to complain when every stranger in the room was whispering wickedly about my hair color.

"Use your equipment and your resources to identify your mystery chemical," Mr. Shiranui said, and proceeded to browse listlessly through a magazine.

I fiddled in anguish with the gas lines and a length of rubber hose, tasked to go it alone while Shino obsessed over some nasty little beetle he'd found in the quad. I'd finally managed to light the Bunsen burner on my own when the little sucker gave a chirp and skittered across the table. I tried to rein in my reaction, simply pressed my lips together and held my breath while it ran little circles around the test tubes.

I reached to turn the gas up on the burner when the putrid thing gave another chirp, and for God's sake, its shell split open and little wings burst from its back. I think my eyes were round as dinner plates when it shot into the air, aiming for my face. "Shino, the bug!" I shrieked, shrinking away from it, my hand overcorrecting on the gas faucet, and I began to frantically shimmy and swat at the beetle.

"Don't kill it!" Shino exclaimed, shooting from his lab stool to snatch the thing out of the air. In his haste, he must have knocked over our mystery chemical, because the empty beaker rolled off the table and hit the floor with a jarring crash. Everyone turned to face us, drawn to the spectacle. What they must have seen was Shino lunging around like he had the Saturday night fever, me dancing like I had ants in my pants.

And that was when the unthinkable happened.

"Sakura, shut off the gas!" Mr. Shiranui exclaimed. I was still frantically swatting at my face when he made the command, and I replied with an intelligent, "huh?"

It was the _only_ thing I could say before the puddle of mystery chemical raged like a tidal wave towards the Bunsen burner, the fumes instantly reacting with the heat of the bright blue fire. The flame gave a sudden _woof _and a tremendous gust of hot air, billowed up in a roiling cloud, and the next thing I knew—

"Oh my God, Sasuke's shirt is on fire!"

Every girl in the room erupted in furious shrieks, running and clawing and tripping over one another to be the first to reach the fire blanket.

I found myself shrieking, too, only because I noticed for the first time that there _was_ a boy at the table in front of mine, and indeed, I'd caught him on fire. He was patting at the flames with a balled up sweater, and I was on the move faster than I think I've ever been in my life. I shut the gas off and grabbed the biggest empty beaker on our table, filling it in the lab station sink before blurting, "Look out!"

"Sakura, the fire's gone!" Shino tried to warn me, but it was too late.

I'd already jerked forward with the beaker, and the water was flying in a rippling gush through the air between us. The boy—Sasuke—snapped his head up in time to take it straight in the face, and like a budding flower, a dark stain bloomed across the front of his gray tee shirt.

I'm not exactly sure _what_ I'd been expecting from him after that—maybe a good-natured "don't worry; it could have happened to anyone!"—but he just stood there, boring into me with eyes so black they were bottomless. Little droplets of water beaded on the tips of his wet hair, hanging there precariously for several seconds before submitting to the effects of gravity.

Each little _plick_, each little droplet that fell past his face seemed to ease the tension in me, and in spite of myself, I found my eyes drawn to the drops that landed on his chest, his collarbones, watched them roll away and disappear into the hidden confines of his V-neck.

All around us, the silence grew suffocating in its depth. And then I heard the growling—a sound so soft I hadn't even noticed it in my suspense. I could hear it now, like a steady rumble emanating from Sasuke's chest. It was almost as if the added silence and the promise of everyone's full attention gave him the push he needed to act, because the rumble became an angry snarl, and he threw his balled up hoodie on the ground with the water and broken glass.

"I can't believe you managed to screw up such a simple experiment!" he erupted, jabbing an accusatory finger at me. "Are you LD or something, Forehead?"

I bit back a gasp, feeling my anger flare up at the way he could so casually insult me. Not having anything to throw on the ground, I simply stomped my foot, crushing glass beneath my shoe. "That's not fair! It wasn't even entirely my fault!" I protested, slamming my palms down on the table and leaning into his fury. _Bring it on, _my body language challenged, _I can take you_. "If Shino hadn't been playing with his bug, none of this would have happened!"

"Sure!" Sasuke retaliated, and then he was leaning in, too, so much that our faces were almost touching. "Pass your clumsiness off on the bug boy, you idiot. Grow up, and learn to take some responsibility! You're so annoying!"

"I'm _annoying_? You're a phlegmatic punk!"

"Did you really just call me _phlegmatic_? You have terrible aim!"

I think the argument must have gone on like that for another several minutes. Mr. Shiranui tried in vain to quiet down the shouts of the angry fan girl mob, rooting on the Über Jock and wishing death upon me in a chorus of loud, angry boos. Some of the guys in the room were cheering him on, too, and I tried not to look so smug when a couple of them sided with _me_. Sasuke and I went on snapping non-traditional insults at one another until the bell rang, and honestly that had been the time I needed to cool down and realize that, in many ways, I _was _at fault—even if only partly.

A chorus of, "Sasuke, come on! The bell rang!" rang out in the middle of one of his more vivid insults, and just when I thought he might actually get the nerve to slam our foreheads together in a head-butt or something, he gave another angry snarl, turned his back on me and started to gather his things.

I stood there in a very awkward state, and I'll admit that I was watching his back muscles flex beneath the thin fabric of his tee-shirt. Mr. Shiranui had left to find a bucket for all the glass, and the cheerleaders had promised to save Sasuke a good spot under his favorite tree. We were utterly alone, and suddenly I didn't feel so right for all the spiteful things I'd called him.

He'd picked up the last of his things and was halfway out the door when I said it.

"I'm sorry!" I blurted, quickly clamping my teeth down on my tongue to keep from adding a "but…".

Part of me expected him to flip me off and never look back, but he surprised me when he paused in the doorway and braced an arm against the frame. His back muscles tensed when he dropped his head and hunched his shoulders, an angry posture that seemed to say he was coiled to pounce, but he surprised me again by blowing out an exasperated gust of a sigh, quickly turning around and crossing the room to me.

I remember holding my breath and standing deathly still then, having to tilt my head back a full forty-five just to look at his face when he was standing that close. I kept thinking, _what a jackass, what a jackass, what a jackass, _until I _really _looked into his eyes, and _holy hell_, with little more than half a foot of space between us, he was a _hot_ son-of-a-mother. "I—I'm sorry…," I said again—felt my lips moving, but I could barely make a sound.

Sasuke's eyes flicked to my mouth as it formed the silent words, then back up to bore into my jade orbs with those stark and gloomy onyx ones, so intense I swore they were red in the heat of our bitter moment. And then he smirked. And then my heart flipped over. And then I stabbed it over and over with a knife I call My Pride.

"You're still annoying," Sasuke conceded. It wasn't the apology I'd been hoping for, but I accepted it with a small sound akin to a whimper.

I could actually _hear_ the amused pirate smile in Sasuke's voice when he broke away and disappeared, leaving me standing there with my head tipped back and my breath trapped in my lungs. I don't think I could have moved from that spot, even in an earthquake.

"Sakura?"

But I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of my name, whipping around to see Mr. Shiranui standing in the doorway with a bucket in either hand. "Oh… I'm really sorry…for causing problems, Mr. Shiranui," I murmured, shamefully dropping my head and falling to my knees to gather up the glass.

"The whole Bunsen burner thing?" he asked, feigning ignorance when I whipped my head up to gape at him in disbelief. "That was obviously a _huge_ misunderstanding," he went on. "And let me tell you something else, Sakura—Sasuke's got a bit of a temper, but he's really not a bad guy once you get to know him. In fact, I wish you could have met him under better circumstances. Just do me a favor and try not to let this little incident ruin your first day—_or_ your first impression of Sasuke, hmm? I'll clean up this mess. Please go get some lunch."

I knelt there with my mouth slightly agape, staring off into space while Mr. Shiranui set to work dutifully cleaning up my mess.

I wasn't sure what to say to that, other than, "Thank you, Mr. Shiranui," utterly touched by his kindness. "I promise it won't happen again." He only smiled and told me he didn't doubt it.

I was pulling myself up when I noticed Sasuke's sweater still balled up on the floor. Mr. Shiranui was going out of his way to conspicuously work around it, careful not to touch it or so much as even _look_ at it while he threw little glass shards into his bucket. When he didn't so much as look at _me,_ either, I thought I knew what he was trying to say. I snatched up the hoodie and stuffed it in my book bag.

I could have _sworn _I left him smirking that day. Then again, it was so long ago, I'm sure I only imagined it.

* * *

Needless to say, I gave Kiba a fiery retelling at lunch—ha-ha, see what I did there? The story was recounted in major detail between Shino and me, while the four of us—Hinata came, too—picked a shady spot and laid a blanket out in the quad.

By the time I'd gotten to the part about throwing water on Sasuke's face, Kiba was on his back, holding his sides, rolling left to right as he fell apart in hysterics. His breath caught in his throat and his face turned so red I actually had to ask him if he was laughing or choking on his lunch. He ignored me, and then suddenly sucked in a breath and erupted in a new bout of head-pounding bellows. "You caught Uchiha's shirt on fire?!" he howled, kicking his feet, slapping his thighs, his whole body shaking with obnoxious, barking laughter. "The freaking _quarterback_?!"

I blushed until my cheeks hurt and gave his knee a playful slap. "Quit laughing," I said. "I didn't mean to."

Kiba fiercely grinned at me, finally reining in his laughter enough to sit up and pat me on the shoulder. "Of course you didn't mean to, Sak," he consoled, and Shino made a sound that told me he might have been rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses. Hinata politely coughed into her fist, trying to hide the fact that she, too, had been laughing.

Kiba bit into his apple and gave me a conspiratorial wink. "It was an honest mistake, Sakura. I mean, really, transfer student turning the most popular guy in school into the Olympic flame on her first day? Hell yeah, happens all the time!"

I blushed even harder and decided not to respond to that.

* * *

Lunch was over too soon. I'd really started to enjoy the breeze in the quad when the bell rang, and students began to gather up their trash and their blankets and head back inside. Kiba pointed me in the direction of my last period classroom, this time imparting some better news about the instructor. "Oh, yeah, you'll love Mr. Hatake," he said, giving me a slap between the shoulder blades in the direction of the appropriate hallway.

I found the room with zero complications, scanning faces as I ventured inside. _Well, this is different, _I thought, noticing that, unlike Mr. Gai's class, Mr. Hatake's room was nearly at capacity. In fact, it looked so full I almost didn't see a single empty seat, but Mr. Hatake intercepted me at the front of the room and gave me a peculiar smile—or so I thought. Half his face was obscured by a regulation surgical mask, and his silver hair fell across one eye.

"Welcome to AP Literature, Ms. Haruno," he said, and I stammered my thanks when he took my paperwork and knowingly signed the appropriate spaces. "Lucky for you, there's still one available seat. Just walk right up the center aisle, take a right—you'll be by Mr. Uchiha. He's the one with the black hair and the angry scowl. Charming young man, really."

I bit my tongue to keep my jaw from dropping open. Curse my luck. Curse my _damn_ luck. Mr. Hatake had handed back my papers, and every girl in the room was bristling like angry cats, glaring daggers at me. I swallowed hard and did as Mr. Hatake said, taking the center aisle and hanging a right, dead on my feet as I floated numbly towards the only empty chair.

"Better watch yourself, Haruno," Sasuke warned as I sank into my seat, a mocking edge to his tone. "Don't make _me_ do it allthe time."

I pointedly ignored him—ended up waiting a good five minutes before I even moved a muscle, my whole body tense while Sasuke seemed utterly and regrettably relaxed. I noticed he'd swapped his V-neck out for a white crew-neck tee shirt, but he wore it under his flashy red and white letterman jacket. Sasuke made a smug little sound as he reclined in his chair, fingers laced behind his head, long legs stretched out languidly in front of him.

I just shot him a resentful look before cautiously pulling out my diary, angling the pages away from Sasuke.

* * *

**Name:** Uchiha Sasuke  
**Date of Birth:** July 23 / **Age:** 17  
**High School Year:** Junior / **Classification:** Jock / popular  
**Notes:** Über Jock. Quarterback on the KHS football team. Huge jackass. So hot. Must fuck.

* * *

**Author's Note: Five years later, re-writing/rereading this story _still _makes me think of "Best Damn Thing" by Avril Lavigne. Anyway, here's hoping that if you're new to this, you've enjoyed it and will continue reading! If you're rereading and have reviewed in the past, I thank you for your continued support! I will be updating the revised versions of the remaining chapters, all the way up to chapter 7. Chapter 8 will be the first new chapter I've written since 2009. Please check the A/N at the beginning of each chapter to be sure that you are reading the revised version, as they may not be updated all at once! Thanks again!**


	2. Friends Among Enemies Part I

**A/N: REVISED TJAM CH 2. Hello again, everyone! Thanks so much for continuing to read! I'll say again that I originally published this story in 2007. I must have been about thirteen, but I'm a college student now, and I felt I really owed it to you as well as myself to go back and improve the quality for your enjoyment. The basics are unchanged—characters and story are all basically the same. Overall, everything is much improved! Please enjoy!**

* * *

New and inconvenient seating arrangements aside, my following years at KHS, I was sure, would be rather interesting.

Sasuke may have been a jerk at first appearances, but he respected my space, and I returned the favor. Of course, that isn't to say he hesitated to piss me off from time to time. We kept a reasonable physical distance between us, but while he couldn't exactly create any tangible inconveniences, I had a hard time keeping him out of my head.

He made an obnoxious habit of getting a rise out of me for his own juvenile entertainment, my pens and pencils often disappearing and not showing up again until the end of class. He'd comment on how _annoying_ the color pink was, and how my hair made my forehead look large. I would brush him off in these instances, lock my _pink_ diary and tuck it into my _pink_ book bag, smile wryly, forget respecting space, and hoist the bag up onto his side of our table.

"It's pink," I'd say. "You like?"

We were recovering from similar persiflage when Mr. Hatake walked into class that day, a rather tall stack of neon-pink handouts in his arms. I nudged Sasuke with my elbow and leered at him, to which he growled menacingly in warning.

"As you know," Mr. Hatake began, "this last period is a block. With all the extra _oodles_ of time on our hands—" He seemed to agonize over this word: oodles. "—I've planned out a long list of this semester's reading requirements."

The class gave a collective groan of displeasure, but I swear I saw Sasuke's lips quirk up in a smug-ass smirk.

"_Relax_, you bunch of princesses," Mr. Hatake countered, rolling his eyes in a sarcastic _woe is me _melodramatic display of histrionics. "This year will be fun—as most years usually are." And to my surprise, the class erupted in laughter and applause and choruses of holy agreement. Sasuke's smirk grew ever more arrogant as he silently nodded his approval, tipping his chair to balance on its back legs.

"All of that aside, I'll be passing around these papers. Don't lose them; you'll find the reading list as well as this semester's _intended_ agenda." Mr. Hatake emphasized the word _intended_ with a begrudging familiarity. "Expect a little bit of required effort this year, children, what with that new principal finally doing her job _correctly_. I'll assign chapters for homework, but you can read ahead—not that I have high hopes for that. We'll have a writing assignment and a book discussion after finishing each volume."

The pile of papers made its way around the room, and Sasuke passed it to me graciously enough. "Not still mad about the fire, are you?" I asked, sheepishly, and accepted the stack of papers.

"It happens, I guess," Sasuke said, but he wasn't paying me much attention. He was already skimming over the neon-pink paper, making a sound here and there where the reading selections either piqued or thwarted his interest. "Do it again, though, and you'll regret it."

I passed the papers to the students across the aisle. "Trust me; it's not high on my list of priorities to catch you on fire again."

That was when Sasuke paused, head swiveling to watch me as I meticulously printed my name at the top of my syllabus. "Well, that's good to know," he said thoughtfully, slowly, sounding even a little bit pleased in his joking manner. "Though, if Shino shirks his duties as a lab partner once more, I seriously suggest you take his beetle and roast _it _on an open flame."

I couldn't help but laugh at that, and Sasuke seemed to smile.

Okay, so maybe he wasn't so bad after all. He was definitely funny, and he had a certain charm about him, the same way Mr. Shiranui suggested shortly after the Bunsen burner incident. What's more is he even looked _human_ when he smiled—or at least capable of human compatibility. I say this because by that point, I'd seriously begun to speculate that _maybe _Sasuke was a robot—it was a highly classified theory of mine.

"The first book on our list," Mr. Hatake began, "Is All Quiet on the Western Front, a classic most of you must _surely_ have heard of." He looked out into the sea of students, observing us with an air that seemed to say he was about to make us squirm. "Who can tell me the name of the author of this infamous war novel?"

I could feel the air stir beside me when Sasuke casually lifted his hand.

"_Other_," Mr. Hatake said, "than Mr. Uchiha?"

Laughter chorused through the aisles, and then it quickly subsided. Sasuke smirked, giving a carefree shrug that seemed to say, _I tried—I tried_. Gee, what a champion for the people. Then he turned to me with that devilishly arrogant smirk and nodded his head at Mr. Hatake. "Go on," he encouraged me. "Don't be shy, Haruno."

"What makes you so certain _I_ know the answer?" I asked him.

"You strike me as a person with a taste for classic literature—you know, a _nerd_."

I hissed at that, leering spitefully at him when he sniggered and turned away.

"No one knows?" Mr. Hatake was pacing now, shoulders set at an irritated angle. "Not a single one of my _AP_ students knows who wrote a_ classic _war novel?"

The "_except for Sasuke_" was implied.

Said pesky Uchiha gave a sigh and outright grabbed my wrist. "Hey, what are you doing?" I protested as he jabbed my hand into the air, going to extra humiliating lengths to foolishly wiggle our conjoined arms around like a floppy streamer in the sky. "Cut that out," I hissed, snatching my hand away and cradling it protectively against my chest.

"Ah, yes!" Mr. Hatake exclaimed, and I went pale. "Ms. Haruno, tell us who wrote the classic All Quiet on the Western Front."

I sat there, dumbfounded, as a few curious faces turned to look at me. The most popular guy in school was jeeringly nudging me with his elbow, poking me with his pen, taunting me with snide remarks of, "_yeah, tell us, Haruno? Who wrote it_?" under his breath. It was all I could do not to slap him across the face and tell him to cut the shit when the room was so quiet and everyone's attention was on me. I dropped my head into my palm and screwed my face up in concentration. "I—I think it was…." Damn it all. He'd asked me too fast. I racked my brain for the answer. Eric, was it? Eric Mary Remark? Somethinglike that. "Erich Maria Remarque."

Sasuke quit poking me with the pen and made a triumphant sound, though for the life of me I didn't know why he was suddenly being so playful.

"You have a very smart Literature partner, Mr. Uchiha," Mr. Hatake said, and his surgical mask twitched with a smile aimed at me. "That is correct, Ms. Haruno. I'm sure glad you remembered that, or that might have been really embarrassing for you." He turned towards the blackboard and picked up a white stick of chalk, writing my answer in neat, rounded letters. "Erich Maria Remarque," he repeated, tapping each corresponding name with the chalk stick. "His book was dubbed 'The Greatest War Novel of All Time.'…"

"Yeah, good thing," I muttered under my breath, waiting until Mr. Hatake turned to face the chalkboard before kicking Sasuke under the table. He jerked and gritted his teeth to keep from outwardly disrupting class. "You're a real jackass. Did I ever tell you that?"

I think if he'd disagreed, he might have made a bigger deal out of that. As it was, he only smirked and resentfully rubbed his shin.

Class persisted like that, Sasuke and I relentlessly harassing each other while Mr. Hatake issued everyone a brand new book. He gave general background information on the author, biographies and whatnot, until it finally came time for him to assign us homework chapters. So I'd already read the book, and I gathered from the way Sasuke listlessly thumbed through the assigned reading that he'd probably read it to. We'd both read it again, just to keep on top of things.

The bell rang and students filed out, Mr. Hatake giving passing high-fives. I gathered up my books and reached for my bag when Sasuke snatched it off the table, for no identifiable reason other than to personally _offer_ it to me. I glanced curiously from my bag to the KHS football prodigy, jock extraordinaire, hottest guy in school, feeling something curious like butterflies twist in my gut.

"Thanks," I murmured, and call me crazy for expecting a pretty civil reply in return. Given the friendlier side I'd been seeing of Sasuke, I didn't think a "you're welcome" was too much to ask for.

Instead, all I got was a monosyllabic, "Hn."

I paused to give Mr. Hatake a high-five on my way out, and he smiled amiably under his surgical mask. "Good work today, Sakura. It makes me proud to have intelligent students like Sasuke and yourself."

I blinked up at Mr. Hatake, humbled by his compliment, before murmuring a sheepish, "Thank you, Teacher. I'm really looking forward to this year."

I exited his classroom, Sasuke close behind, when I saw Hinata and Kiba waiting for me.

"Hey there, Sakura," Kiba said, and he held his arms out as if he intended to envelop me in a hug.

It was an awkward gesture, coming from Kiba, but I took a step forward to accommodate him until I felt a hand heavy on my shoulder, stopping me. I paused mid-step and turned around, looking up to see that Sasuke was standing over me, smug and arrogant as ever.

"'Good work today, Sakura,'" he said, and I almost fell to pieces when I realized he'd actually used my _name_ instead of "Forehead" or "Haruno." Then the way his lips quirked up in response to my reaction seemed to put things back into perspective. It was the same thing Mr. Hatake had said before I'd exited the classroom.

"Yeah, yeah, you're funny, Sasuke," I said. "Mock me all you want. Too bad it's _you_—not me—who's the teacher's pet."

"Tch, you keep telling yourself you're better than me, Haruno," Sasuke said, and while I probably should have been offended by that, I smiled. This was the way we'd come to talk to one another, after all. Naturally, when the normal means of communication is through a finely-tuned dynamic of measured insults and invasive touching, you start to know less and less when to _actually_ be offended.

Once Sasuke had left us all alone, Hinata seemed to stare at me like I'd grown another head. "W-was that real?" she asked, glancing frantically between me and Sasuke's retreating form.

"What do you mean?" I asked, shifting my book bag onto my shoulder. "Of course it was real."

Kiba had since frozen up, and he was standing stock still with his head turned in the direction that Sasuke had gone. When he turned back to look at me, he and Hinata wore identical expressions, their eyebrows arched meaningfully and their arms crossed over their chests. "I think…," Kiba hypothesized, "that you may have befriended Uchiha Sasuke."

I pondered that—seriously _pondered_ it—taking into consideration everything that had transpired between Sasuke and me. The three of us started for the parking lot while I continued to face the facts: Sasuke was a jock—a popular. I was just me, pink-haired nerd with a big forehead. "Nah, I don't think that's it," I finally decided. "He's forgiven me for the Bunsen burner thing, but he can still be really mean sometimes."

"That's because he's Uchiha Sasuke," Hinata explained. "He's really always b-been that way."

"Hinata's right," Kiba agreed, nodding sagely to her interpretation. "Though, I gotta say, if you really _did_ befriend Uchiha Sasuke, that makes you one of _us_ now. Like, for _real_, Haruno." I gave him a questioning look as he casually maneuvered himself closer. "You're friends with a jock—more specifically, Uchiha Sasuke."

"Wait," I said, nudging Kiba in the ribs. "Technically, I'm already friends with a jock, or am I wrong about that, Mr. Running Back?"

"No, you're right. But I said 'more specifically, Uchiha Sasuke'!"

We emerged from the vestibule into a wash of bright afternoon sun. Hinata made a sound as she pulled her phone from her pocket, tapping out a quick text message before giving Kiba and me a sheepish look. "S-sorry, guys," she said. "I just got a text from my c-cousin. I've got to pick him up, so I'll see you both tomorrow." Hinata broke away with a friendly wave and a loving smile.

"Speaking of 'picking up,'" Kiba said, gesturing grandiosely at the sea of sports cars that stretched before us. "How exactly do you get around?"

God, why'd he have to ask me that question? Should I tell him about my moped, the rusty Impala? Maybe I'd just tell him I walk everywhere. After a split second of frantic deliberation, I decided it was best to stick with the truth. I sheepishly averted my gaze before admitting that my mom still drove me around, but I'd be taking the bus for a while. When he realized I wasn't kidding, he seemed to have to stifle his laughter.

"Oh, that's cute," he said, nudging me playfully. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you really don't _want_ to ride the bus."

"You're a freaking genius," I muttered. "Genius of geniuses, in fact. I can't wait to cram myself into a small, narrow space with a busload of strangers who'll hate on my hair and my gargantuan forehead."

Kiba seemed to balk at this, nudging me again, but with a different kind of insistence. "FYI," he said, "Your hair color is out of this world, and your forehead is the normal size. But if you're going to bitch about it, you and your normal-sized forehead might as well hitch a ride with me." He hooked a thumb at his chest, dangling a set of shiny keys at me with the other hand. "What do you say? I won't even make you sit in the trunk."

"Are you kidding me?" I asked, and by my enthusiasm, he knew what I'd meant.

"Yeah, I'm serious," he said. "Kiba saves the day. Come on, the worldly deeds don't stop at the dismissal bell, you know." He took me by the wrist and seemed to almost drag me through the parking lot. I found myself looking frantically around for a car that I'd consider substandard, even for the affluent, but every hood ornament and racing stripe screamed "TRAILER PARK FOR THE FILTHY RICH."

Kiba didn't stop until we'd come to a spicy red sports car. "Jesus, is this a Ferrari?" I asked, too afraid to touch it, even when Kiba opened the passenger side door and tossed my bag in. I carefully crawled into the cab and let myself sink slowly into the supple leather passenger seat.

"Like it?" he asked, getting in on the driver's side and keying the engine to life. I gave a start when I felt the thing start to vibrate under my body. "It purrs like a kitten," he gushed, affectionately patting the dashboard. "She's my second, though. I wrapped the first one around a tree."

"That's a damn shame," I groaned, luxuriating in the sheer extravagance as Kiba put the gears in reverse. I curiously toyed with some of the controls until the power roof gave a hum and automatically retracted. "Whoa, cool trick!" I mused, and Kiba gave a laugh and a smirk while he watched me play.

He was navigating the lot when I found myself drawn to some familiar faces. The flash of platinum blonde hair across campus was an unmistakable trademark for the one and only Yamanaka Ino, but as Kiba gave me a familiar nudge, I realized it wasn't so much _Ino_ who'd caught my attention, but the guy she was with. When I saw her nuzzled up close to my Literature partner, I don't know if I felt angry or if I felt relieved.

But then I saw his hand resting possessively on her hip, and I knew exactly what it was—it was jealousy.

"Yamanaka Ino breaks the heart of yet _another_ young and naïve schoolgirl," Kiba began to narrate. "And _of course_ you didn't know that the star football player and the star cheerleader were two sides of the same narcissistic coin. They make quite the cute little power couple, wouldn't you say? In that stereotypical makes-me-want-to-stab-myself-in-the-eye-with-an-icepick kind of way."

I made a small sound, just barely regarding his effusive sarcasm.

"But hey, don't let it get to you, Sak. If you want to be Sasuke's girlfriend badly enough, you'll find yourself trying out for cheerleader."

I swiveled my head to give Kiba a look of unrivaled disbelief. "As _if_," I said, propping an elbow against the car door and leaning my head into my palm. "I don't even care about stupid Sasuke. I was just curious…that's all."

Kiba made a small sound of consent, but he wasn't stupid. All that considering, I was grateful he didn't probe or tease for more answers after that.

"So, where do you live?" he asked, clearly trying to divert the subject. I relayed my address in a half-dead drone, my face already asleep in my palm. Kiba made a sound of mock-conceit before nudging me again with his elbow. "Look alive, Sakura," he teased. "Paparazzi."

I picked my head up when I realized he was right. As we were navigating out of the KHS parking lot, students had turned to look at us together, Kiba picture-perfect in his Varsity jacket and his red Ferrari. I was little more than a seat ornament—and not a very good one, at that—fully exposed by the retracted roof.

I could picture the headline in the school paper already: _Nerdy New-Comer Hitches Ride with Overly-Generous Jock, Inuzuka_. Though, surprisingly, students only watched with envy, not malice.

I could feel their stares, and I realized it didn't bother me. When I felt Ino's, it bothered me even less.

* * *

Kiba walked me to the door, which proved to be a scene straight out of a romantic comedy.

On the fence as I was about getting too close to him, I was hoping desperately to avoid any awkward attempts at kisses good bye, simply telling him he could text me anytime.

We stood face-to-face for quite some time, even after that, and I could tell my subject-change had hardly derailed his train of thought. Whatever he was thinking, he was thinking hard about it.

I just patted him on the back like he'd been doing to me all day and said, "Thanks for the ride, Kiba."

"Yeah," he said, coming back to the here-and-now, and gave me his usual charming pirate smile. "If you ever need another one, don't be too shy to ask."

It was a sweet offer. I was glad he liked me enough to make it, but I knew I'd probably never ask him again. I couldn't take advantage of a friend like that, more now than ever since we'd only just met. Mom was right—KHS was an opportunity to reinvent myself, and I was going to do things right this time if I hoped to maintain any _real_ relationships.

I had a feeling Kiba would sorely insist, though—"it's only a generous offer," he'd say. "Friend to friend," he'd say. So all I said was, "I'll keep that in mind."

He drove off with a wave over his shoulder, and I stood on the porch until he was gone from sight.

* * *

I didn't expect to find Mom chopping vegetables in the kitchen. "I thought you were working late," I said, going to the fridge and pulling out a water. I uncapped it and took a drink while she hurriedly prepared a stew, moving a handful of chopped carrots from her cutting board to a pot on the stove. "We gonna eat dinner together?"

"I wish I could," Mom said, starting on potatoes. "A little something came up at the office. I have enough time to make you dinner, and then I'm afraid I'm off to work." I made an indulgent sound, reclining against the counter while I watched her throw the potatoes in and then mince some herbs. She tossed them into the pot before making a sound. "I just remembered—you got some mail today from the local gym. I left some money for the fees on the table, and I even managed to find and unpack the box with all your gymnastics things in it."

"Wow, thanks, Mom," I said, giving her an appreciative smile. Even better, if the letter was what I thought it was, my membership card had arrived only a day after my application.

Before I could comment on this, Mom had turned to me with a spoonful of stew. I leaned forward, tasted it and gave her a satisfied nod. "What you showed up in didn't exactly look like a school bus," she said—an interesting attempt at engaging me in talk about boys, but I wouldn't take the bait. "Who was the young man in the convertible?"

"His name's Kiba," I said, simple answer to a complex question. "He offered to drive me home. I _promise_ it was still a learning experience, though—the whole _day_ was a learning experience, really."

Mom seemed to chew on that before giving a complacent nod. "Okay, honey," she said, resuming her work. She muttered something under her breath along the lines of, "What exactly did you _learn_?"

Maybe she'd thought I couldn't hear her over the bubbling of the stew, and I preferred not to have to respond as if I could. Didn't Mom know me at all? I couldn't stave off my blush at her evident theories of how I spent my alone time in sports cars with good-looking boys, so I excused myself to take my book bag to my room.

I ended up reading the first ten chapters of the book we'd been issued that day, despite the assignment only calling for the first three. It's not as if I'd intended to read that many chapters—I'd set out to do the required amount until I looked up at the clock and realized Mom had certainly gone by then. I'd skipped dinner and read from four to eight with only a few naps in between, so I said to hell with it and finished the last twelve chapters.

I read and snacked until midnight and sent good night texts to Mom and Dad, even to Kiba and Hinata after a slight pause for deliberation. I settled into bed and thought myself into a sleepless oblivion, until even my dreams were plagued by birds, war, gunshots, and the sight of Sasuke's hand on Ino's hip.

* * *

I knew that the next day at school would be even more interesting than the first—I use "interesting" loosely here, because I couldn't imagine anything more thought-provoking than catching Sasuke's shirt on fire.

Mr. Gai greeted me with his usual smile, remarkably even more enthusiastic than he'd been the morning before. He offered me a "youthful number two pencil." I politely declined in favor of my timeworn, chewed-up diary pen.

Mr. Gai was appalled.

I found an empty seat nearer to the back this time. Mr. Gai gave us a crash course on body image before dismissing us early for a "free-to-be-youthful period." One person had the nerve to ask him what that had to do with Health class, and Gai responded fervently by making me an example. "Take your classmate, Ms. Haruno!" he exclaimed. "I happen to know that she is extremely self-conscious about the size of her forehead! Ideally, a student with insecurities, such as Ms. Haruno's, would use this youthful time to reflect upon how, in fact, her forehead is of an average size!"

My forehead hit the desk then, unable to take the celebrity.

I kept my head down for the duration of the free period, until I heard the sound of snapping bubble gum, way too close for comfort. When I looked up, Ino and her posse of wannabes and cheerleader kiss-ass mavens stood over me, a motley crew of slutty outfits, overkill cleavage and hands on hips. "We saw you yesterday," Ino said, unceremoniously shoving my books aside to make room for her butt on my desk. "You were riding with Kiba-cutie in his sexy car. Kiba-cutie _never_ takes new kids for a ride. Tell me what _that_ was about."

"I really don't have to explain myself to you," I said, though when one of the girls with double buns on her head leaned in with a balled up fist, I knit my brow and begrudgingly glanced between her and Ino. "I needed a ride. Kiba and I are friends. Naturally he'd take me home."

"_Right_," Ino said, drawing out the vowel. "As _if _Kiba-cutie would consider such an unpopular geek like yourself to be his friend—it's bad enough that he spends all hours of the day with Stutters and the bug freak. So where are you from anyway, _Forehead_?"

I narrowed my eyes at Ino and leaned away from her, as much as possible. "I'm from Maru High," I said, "And you shouldn't talk about other people so negatively. Hinata is a really nice girl. Shino…Shino _is _a bug freak." I couldn't disagree with her there. "But you shouldn't let little things like that define the way you look at a person." I felt my own words strike a chord somewhere deep inside. Was this why I hadn't given up on the thought of being Sasuke's friend? Because I thought there was more to him than just football and a sour attitude?

Ino and her posse stared at me like I'd grown another head, then quickly turned their backs and formed a huddle. I was forced to sit there and watch while they blabbered and whispered to one another, giggling like bimbos when Ino said something they particularly liked. "Totally," I heard her stage whisper, and she popped her bubble gum before turning on me at full tilt.

"The girls and I were talking," Ino said. "You're not bad. It takes moxie to be a bitch to a bitch, so we think you should totally go out for the cheerleading squad. I mean, why would you waste such…such…." She looked me up and down. "…such great _legs_? Yeah, that's it. You have really great legs."

"And hair," said the brunette with the buns.

"I mean it, Sakura," Ino continued, snapping her gum again. "It would be _hilar_—" she stopped herself. "I mean, it would be _fantabulous_!"

I almost rolled my eyes. Suddenly I felt sick that _fantabulous _was a real word, just because it pained me to hear Ino actually use it correctly. I swatted her hand away when she reached for my diary, snatching up the notebook and holding it securely to my chest. "I don't think I should," I said, trying with all my might to sound foreboding. Instead, I evoked another bout of giggles from the girls.

Ino smiled that devious smile again, and suddenly I remembered all my dreams from the night before—evil visions of Sasuke's hand on that white and red pleated miniskirt.

What if those legs had been _my _"great" legs?

"You'll come to the right decision," Ino said. "We know it, and you'll…_love it_ much."

With that, the Queen Bee and her posse left me alone to youthfully reflect on Ino's proposal. _This must be a trick, _I decided, and flipped open my diary. The first thing I did was make changes to Sasuke's entry.

* * *

**Name:** Uchiha Sasuke  
**Date of Birth:** July 23 / **Age:** 17  
**High School Year:** Junior / **Classification:** Jock / popular  
**Notes:** Über Jock. Quarterback on the KHS football team. Grinch-complex, complete with warming heart. _Wish_ I could fuck. Yamanaka Ino's older boyfriend.

* * *

**Name:** Yamanaka Ino  
**Date of Birth:** September 23 / **Age:** 16  
**High School Year:** Sophomore / **Classification:** Cheerleader / popular  
**Notes:** Captain of the cheerleading squad. Younger girlfriend of KHS QB, Uchiha Sasuke. Manipulative. Charismatic. Has _oodles_ of monetary power.

* * *

**Author's Note: Thank you for your continued support! I will be updating the revised versions of the remaining chapters, all the way up to chapter 7. Chapter 8 will be the first new chapter I've written since 2009. Please check the A/N at the beginning of each chapter to be sure that you are reading the revised version, as they may not be updated all at once! Thanks again!**


	3. Friends Among Enemies Part II

**A/N: REVISED TJAM CH 3. Hello again, everyone! Thanks so much for continuing to read! I'll say again that I originally published this story in 2007. I must have been about thirteen, but I'm a college student now, and I felt I really owed it to you as well as myself to go back and improve the quality for your enjoyment. The basics are unchanged—characters and story are all basically the same. Overall, everything is much improved! Please enjoy!**

* * *

Ms. Yuhi was my second period instructor for mathematics. She was a tall, shapely woman with long brown hair and a killer sense of fashion, and I'd found myself thinking that I would really grow to like such an exemplary teacher. After only two days, I could already see that she knew how to keep things interesting, her joking, teasing manner coming and going, always keeping you guessing what kind of mood she'd be in next.

Her subtle sex appeal and nice-but-not-too-nice attitude were two qualities that I really envied. _If I were more like Ms. Yuhi, would Sasuke find me attractive?_ I held my chin in my hand while she scratched algorithms and numbers furiously onto the chalkboard.

I let my eyes wander slowly at that thought, and they didn't have to wander far, either. Like you'd expect with my luck, Sasuke was in this class, and he occupied the seat in front of mine. For now, he was absently scrawling notes onto a scrap of loose leaf paper. _Must be for Ino_, I thought resentfully, and whether it had been or not, it wouldn't have mattered. Everything he did, I associated with Ino. If he wasn't wearing a sweater that period: _Ino's probably wearing it. _If he bought two sodas instead of one at the vending machine: _He probably bought that for Ino._

Kiba sat beside me, which was the _only_ relief I could get from my constant thoughts of Sasuke—_hey_, don't judge me. It was hard not to think about him when he was always right in front of my face, like the carrot on the string. I was just the damned donkey.

Even more than that, though, with Kiba filling up my partner seat, Shino couldn't sit beside me. Don't get me wrong—he and I are thick as thieves. But ever since the Bunsen burner incident, the bug freak had taken up this annoying habit of passing notes to me in class. Under normal circumstances, I'd be all for it. But Shino's idea of a good time is hand-sketched diagrams of ugly little weevils. Regardless of my general disinterest in bugs, I can't draw. Notes with Shino are not fun.

Kiba nudged me with his elbow. I barely lifted my chin from my hand, just enough to give him a cursory look out of the corner of my eye. He winked at me and slid a note across the table, and I couldn't help but smile after what I'd just been thinking about. I brought it towards myself and unfolded it under the table.

_Pep rally this Friday. You coming?_

I definitely smiled this time, glancing up intermittently to check on Ms. Yuhi's progress before I scribbled out a reply.

_Are you asking me on a date, Kiba?_

I carefully watched his expression when he took the paper and read my handwriting. Color slowly rose in his cheeks, and he looked back at me with something like uncomfortable annoyance. "Are you or not?" he hissed.

"Mr. Inuzuka!"

Heads snapped up when Ms. Yuhi barked Kiba's name, then the class dissolved into giggles upon his stammered apology. "I'm sorry, Teach!" Kiba yelled, flashing that toothy pirate grin at Sasuke, who'd turned to shoot him an irritated glare.

"Way to go," I whispered, but when he'd insistently prodded me for an answer, I rolled my eyes and gave a subtle nod.

* * *

Next class was Chemistry with Mr. Shiranui again.

For the second time, he'd assigned us lab partners, and this time, I didn't get Shino. You get one guess as to whom. It was so overtly planned that it was almost a believable coincidence when he called my name and tacked on a listless, "with Sasuke," almost like a fleeting afterthought. In too many ways, I was disappointed. But in just as many others, I was out of my mind with elation.

Initially, Sasuke seemed reluctant to trust me with a Bunsen burner.

"I don't think you have to worry about that, Sasuke," Mr. Shiranui said. Then he turned to me. "You won't catch anyone on fire this time, will you, Ms. Haruno?" He raised his eyebrows meaningfully and smiled wickedly. With a look like that, I couldn't help but shift nervously from foot to foot.

"N-nah, I'll try not to," I stammered, but the students sitting nearest to me still conspicuously moved away.

Mr. Shiranui wrote our task up on the board—a companion to the mystery chemical experiment that required all the same materials. "How about I handle the beakers and the chemicals this time," I volunteered, noting the way Sasuke seemed to eye the gas faucets and the tubing. "You can light the Bunsen burner. Then how about later we play some trust games? Would _that_ put you at ease?"

"Not really," Sasuke answered, but he dutifully reached for the burner and began to set up our heat station. "I know you'll find _something_ to screw up."

My face flushed. "That was totally a onetime thing," I snapped, grabbing up the beakers and evenly distributing the chemicals. "If you're a little bit nicer to me, I promise it won't _necessarily_ happen again."

As was our tradition, Sasuke and I continued this witty repartee, all the while working surprisingly well together to amalgamate a chemical concoction that glowed bright cerulean over our heat station. I smirked at Sasuke. "See? A successful procedure—and I didn't even blow anything up." He ignored this and proceeded to mix in another compound, shooting me a look that seemed to say _we're not done _yet.

It bubbled and fizzed, and I cringed away, fearing detonation. At this, Sasuke made an irritated sound. "Don't look so scared, Forehead," he grumbled. "You really think I'm _that_ stupid?"Rude as he could be, I admit that out of everyone, Sasuke was the one I trusted the most not to mix up a liquid, lethal death bludgeon. Still, I used my whole face to shut my eyes when he started to decant another compound.

"Look out!" someone suddenly screamed, and I shrieked at the sound of shattering glass and splattering liquids.

I felt the concoction splash across my skin before I even opened my eyes, yipping and shivering from the biting cold. I swiveled in my stool to look at Sasuke—he was trembling with rage, dripping wet once more, hands balled into fists at his sides.

I felt my stomach churn when I saw an angry muscle jump in his jaw. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" I started to babble—though I'm not sure _why_. If anything, this was _his_ fault—but he suddenly burst out with another angry snarl, and it wasn't _my_ name that tore from his lips.

"Naruto!" he growled, fiercely turning on a blonde boy in a letterman jacket. He was similarly soaked to the bone, his spiky hair limp and dripping.

"Relax, will you?" the jock—Naruto—whined, when Sasuke stabbed a finger at his chest and bombarded him with a slew of fresh insults. "Oi, that's hurtful. It's just water, Sasuke!"

Seeing the two football players exchange biting, half-hearted insults, I felt a familiar sense of déjà vu. Before I knew it, I'd begun to laugh. Naruto's worktable was a dripping mess, while mine was dry and neat. Indeed, when I checked, Sasuke's chemicals were glowing brightly in our beaker. I wasn't even sane enough, right when Sasuke whirled on me, to effectively process what he was saying.

He viciously demanded that I stop laughing and get a little angry at the blonde for ruining my clothes. I merely sat back on my stool and tried to hold myself together, ribs splitting open as I dissolved into hysterics.

I didn't know how many times this was going to happen to me at KHS—whether the hysterical fits of laughter or the explosions in Chemistry class—but I had a pretty solid feeling that I was going to get used to it _too_ soon. What a strange and wonderful experience this school year was turning out to be.

* * *

Fussiness set in soon after the hysterics wore off, but Sasuke assured me Naruto would make up for it later.

He did, actually, by finding me at the end of lunch and getting me out of History with Mr. Umino. "I'm really sorry about the water," Naruto said. We were walking together through the empty halls of KHS. "I really don't know what went wrong there. I guess you're not supposed to put glass on an open flame…heh heh." Naruto ruffled his still-damp hair, shaken out now so that it stood up in wild spikes in all directions.

"Not unless it's Pyrex," I told him, and I stifled a giggle when he gave me a flat look. "It's alright. It wouldn't be fair of me to hold it against you after the stunt I pulled yesterday. I guess Kiba was right though—it really _can _happen to anyone."

I really got to know Naruto then, and through that, I realized that he was more like Kiba than Sasuke—deeper on an emotional and social level than the typical popular KHS jock. Even more than that, I learned he was apparently Konoha High School's resident class clown. Shattering beakers in Chemistry and soaking Sasuke to the tips of his hair was apparently amateur hour for this guy.

We exchanged numbers and agreed that we would be seeing one another on Friday—turned out Kiba was a mutual friend, and a very close one, at that.

When we arrived at the office, Naruto briefly explained the situation to Shizune. She regarded him rather calmly, despite scolding him for his follies and warning him in a good-natured way to stay out of trouble. "Come with me, Sakura," she said, and I followed her behind the reception desk to a private closet at the back of the office. "We keep a full wardrobe for little emergencies such as this," she explained. "Usually comes in handy when girls bleed through their pants, but this is just as important. 'Always be prepared,' the principal says!"

I cautiously peeked into the closet, not really sure what I was expecting to find, when Shizune's arm shot out with a full ensemble hanging neatly from a velvet hanger.

"Can I really wear these?" I asked, gingerly taking the hanger from her hand. She'd selected a denim miniskirt and a silky turquoise halter top—a little on the immodest side for the kinds of things I was used to wearing, but they looked _and_ felt expensive.

"Of course you can!" Shizune said. "That color will suit your hair and really bring out your eyes. You can keep them, too. Come over here. Go put those on."

"Keep them?!" I'd begun to exclaim, but she'd given me an unceremonious shove into the office bathroom, slamming the door shut behind me. I dressed quickly and had a good look at myself in the mirror, turning this way and that, ultimately very pleased with how I looked.

When I came back out, Naruto had already changed into something dry—just a black crew-neck tee-shirt—and stood chatting with Shizune at the desk. He looked my way at the sound of the opening door and let out a low whistle. "Looking good, Sakura!" he exclaimed, playfully pulling at the neck of his tee-shirt, as if the room had suddenly gotten _way_ too hot.

"Cut that out, Naruto!" Shizune hissed, rolling up a paper packet and smacking him across the head. He yowled playfully while she yelled at him to conduct himself like a gentleman.

"These _are_ really nice," I admitted, fidgeting sheepishly with the hem of the denim miniskirt. "It's quite a convenient luxury." I thanked Shizune and asked Naruto to take me back to class. "What about Sasuke's clothes?" I asked him, once we were traversing the halls again.

Naruto just snorted and ran a hand through his spiky hair. "Sasuke's been in my science classes since we were kids. He knows better to keep some spares."

* * *

**Name: **Uzumaki Naruto  
**Date of Birth: **October 10 / **Age: **17  
**High School Year: **Junior / **Classification**: Jock / popular  
**Notes: **Loud, boisterous, KHS class clown. Undoubtedly great guy. Sasuke's best friend. Halfback for KHS football team.

* * *

When we arrived at Mr. Umino's class, Naruto gestured for me to follow him to a pair of empty seats. The two of us settled quietly back into the flow of things, Naruto reclining in his chair while I quickly scribbled down the notes I'd missed. Sometime during my note taking, Mr. Umino had turned around and was having a curious look around the room.

"What in the world is everyone staring at?" he asked. I felt Naruto go stiff beside me.

When I looked up, I realized that a dozen or so fingers were pointed my way. "Wait, m-me?" I stammered, feeling the blood suddenly rush to my face. Did these clothes make my forehead look big or something? Naruto made an irritated sound when a few of the boys frantically nodded their heads that, yes, they were looking at me. "When did Sakura get hot?" one of them muttered, and I was blushing so hard that my cheeks started to hurt.

"Hey, leave her alone, you nasty animals!" Kiba was standing up in the back, pumping a fist like a war general giving the command to "charge!" His jock friends laughed and exchanged high-fives. "You da man, dog!" one of them shouted, and I just sank lower into my chair.

"Naruto," I mumbled, discreetly nudging him with my elbow. "Looks like you've got some competition."

He made another irritated sound before shaking his head and pulling a slight grin. "No way," he said. "We jocks share all the glory. Besides, Kiba may be _clowny_, but _I'm_ the one who always gets sent to the office."

* * *

It turned out that Kiba liked to do things for me often, and doing those things, like writing me notes or walking me to class, always seemed to brighten up my day. I really couldn't have asked to get nailed in the forehead by anyone else's football—it was the unlikely harbinger to the realest of true friendships.

"So," I began at one of those instances of Kiba doing things for me. We were walking side by side through the halls, just killing time until the last period of the day. "I hear that the Pep Rally is this Friday and _everyone_ is going to be there."

Kiba, while usually pretty suave around members of the opposite sex, seemed to go to pieces at my teasing. There was a moment of awkward silence between us before he looked at me with a disquieting seriousness. "Sakura, about that…you don't feel weird around me now, do you?"

I raised an eyebrow at Kiba's question, shook my head and said, "It was a nice gesture from a good friend. If I'm having any reservations at all about it, it's only that I've never been to a rich kid's pep rally before. I'm guessing there won't be hand-decorated banners and cheek glitter."

Kiba laughed. "Oh, there _will_ be cheek glitter," he said. "Maybe not too many hand-decorated banners, though. We get those custom-made at a print shop. But, I mean it, Sak. I didn't want to put you in a weird situation. Especially because I know how you like Uchiha and all—"

"Wha?—_hey!_" I exclaimed, nudging Kiba with my elbow. "Why would you say a ridiculous thing like _that_?"

It was Kiba's turn to turn that skeptical look on me. "I'm not stupid, Sakura. Today in math it was like your eyelids were tied to the back of his head. I may have only known you for a day, but I'm pretty sure I know a schoolgirl crush when I see one."

I decided not to argue with him, instead taking the direct approach. "So maybe you're right," I conceded. "But maybe that's all it is: just a schoolgirl crush. Those things never last long—right? It's just green love."

Kiba denied my last comment and insisted that he'd seen my type before—that it was green love _now, _but it would bloom into a freaking Venus fly trap. "You won't know when to quit," he said. "You'll stop at nothing to get what you want, even if that means Konoha High School's most popular guy and football prodigy."

"You know what, never mind I said anything," I interjected, feeling defensive at the way Kiba was suddenly all about heckling me and my petty love interests. "If you really want to, we'll just go as friends. Is _that_ what you want, Kiba?"

He blinked. "Sakura, it's just a pep rally."

Blood rushed to my face and I felt like an idiot for assuming he'd literally intended to take me as a _date_. I mean, why would he? I was me, and he was Kiba—cute jock, super popular, sexy car, _friend zone_. "Oh. Sorry," I mumbled, but to his credit, he jabbed my burning cheek with an index finger and had me laughing again in nanoseconds.

"So, did you play a sport at Maru High?" he suddenly asked me.

Did I ever really play a sport? Could you call what I did _playing?_ "I've been into gymnastics since I was little," I said. "I just joined the local gym. Gonna check out the tumbling facilities in the next day or two."

Kiba made a sound that was rife with a kind of skepticism. "Gymnastics—like handsprings and splits and tight, glittery leotards?" I gave him a sideways look at the leotard comment but nodded, nonetheless. "I really don't get you, Haruno. You have all these hidden talents and you bottle them up like you're too shy to tell the world that you're actually _good_ at something. With skills like those, you could really put Ino in her place, you know. Why not go out for cheerleader?"

I snorted, rolling my eyes when Kiba nudged me and asked me again. He looked at me as if to say, _I'm freaking serious_, and started to lead us down a different hallway_. _"Ino told me the same thing this morning," I explained, following him without question. "And if _she's_ trying to get me to put on a miniskirt and bounce around in the gym, I _know_ it can't be a good idea."

"_No,_" Kiba gasped. "Are you trying to tell me that Yamanaka Ino is plotting against the new kid? How _dare_ you, Haruno? She's a _nice_ lady!"

I just elbowed him then, harder than I'd meant to, and he huffed out a breath and dramatically clutched his side.

"You're seriously tempting me," I told him. "I kind of want to do it now, just to shut you up." But as we walked on in companionable silence, I couldn't help thinking that that wasn't really the case.

Kiba led me into what looked to be a student's lounge, a circular room with some plush leather arm chairs and glass furniture. He walked up to one of the tables by the wall and snatched up a bright pink piece of paper, offering it to me with a rather grave look. I stepped forward and took the paper from him, instantly repulsed by the smell of strong perfume. "This stinks," I groaned, holding it at arm's length, but Kiba pushed my hand towards my face and encouraged me to read it.

It was a flyer advertising cheerleading tryouts, and honest-to-God, it had Ino's face printed all over it. "She really _is_ the Narcissus of my life," I muttered, but as I read the tryout details, I saw past the tricks and pranks and popularity games to reality—what would Ino think if I really _did_ tryout?—if I actually _made_ it? Would she be surprised?—or on some level, was she expecting me to succeed? I had the moves and the flexibility. There was no question of my experience. Not to mention that, having no real measure of Ino's ability, for all I knew, I could have been _better_ than her. Now _that _was a notion I could get used to.

My ego felt pampered as I mulled it over. I could show her up. I could surpass the master. I could make a _name_ for myself—maybe be Sakura the Cheerleader instead of Sakura the Forehead.

"I'm in," I said, shocking Kiba with my sudden fiery determination.

"You sure?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow at me. "You know what you're getting yourself into. You've met those harpies."

"Hell yeah, Inuzuka. You're going to the pep rally with a pink-haired cheerleader."

* * *

After that, I couldn't have gotten to the gymnasium fast enough.

Kiba insisted that he would stay and watch me tryout, anxious to get the first peek at the so-called "ninja moves" I'd been hiding from everyone. It unnerved me to have him sitting there, even in the nosebleed seats, watching me lose myself to one of my greatest passions. I felt at his mercy—would I be lithe and graceful? Would I be good enough to impress him and whoever else was watching?

In the end, I decided to let the pressure fuel me on and take solace from his support.

When we arrived, the judge was already waiting for us. "And you are Ms. Haruno, I presume," she said, looking me over with a confident air. "Good figure, strong legs, toned arms. You clearly look like the athletic type. And really, just the fact that you're _here_ proves you have guts. Pep squads aren't always easy teams to be a part of, you know. Those girls are demons in miniskirts." I smiled at that, shaking the hand of the woman with blonde pigtails. "I'm Principal Tsunade," she said, and I felt my face twitch in response to this unforeseen revelation.

"Principal," I repeated, slightly awestruck, but I nodded in reply. "It's nice to meet you."

"Likewise," Tsunade said, turning my hand over and pressing a pair of red cotton, wadded-up shorts into my palm. "So, Ms. Haruno, prepared to show us what you can do?" I took the gym shorts and promptly slid them on under the miniskirt, glancing up at the high rafter ceiling in time to the sudden clapping of her hands. There was the unmistakable sound of a generator starting up, and then the lights suddenly blared to life in a flash of white and blue, stinging my eyes.

Principal Tsunade gestured to a matted area on the other side of the gym. I walked swiftly over to it, ready for her to give the first command. "Let me see a front tuck, to start," Tsunade said, and I couldn't help but smile. I almost _hoped_ this was a warm-up, or defeating Ino was going to be way too easy.

I executed the front tuck, held my breath for some kind of criticism, but all Tsunade said was "Good, now a standing round off back handspring." The rest of the tryout went on much like this, the principal making one command after another, me executing with confidence and silent prayers. The longer we went on, the more advanced the maneuvers became, and I knew after the first fifteen minutes that she was no longer scoring me, but testing the extent of my abilities. "Backflip twist; back handspring, layout step out; triple series."

I did a long string of demonstrations until finally she clapped her hands together and said, "Congratulations, you've made the squad!"

By that point, it's not as if I'd been expecting _rejection_, but I couldn't help it—I flushed. "I really did? I made it?" I asked, and I flushed even harder when Kiba erupted into howls in the nosebleed seats. Principal Tsunade nodded. "You performed very well, Ms. Haruno. Those were some very impressive maneuvers at the end—better than Ms. Yamanaka's, even. And for that reason… Well…." Principal Tsunade trailed off and disguised it with a modest smile.

Kiba joined us on the mats and we exchanged curious glances. "Have a lovely day, you two," Tsunade suddenly said, and I thanked her again and attempted to return the shorts she'd given me. "You keep those," Tsunade said. "You're on the team now; you'll need them. In the meantime, I'll inform the squad of their new addition. The girls will be responsible for teaching you routines and getting you set up with a uniform for the big game against the Bells."

"Big game?" I repeated. "You mean, the one on _Friday_?!" I nearly shrieked this last bit, but Kiba snatched my wrist and dragged me out of the gymnasium before the words could leave my lips. I had to yell my flustered "t-thanks again!" to Principal Tsunade, who seemed to chuckle at Kiba's antics and gave a ceremonious, princess-like wave.

"Good luck!" she called after us, and that was the last time I saw Principal Tsunade until the game on Friday night.

* * *

I arrived at Mr. Hatake's class with time to spare before the bell.

To my displeasure, I'd worked up a sweat at my tryout, and I was frantically fanning myself to get cool again. I trudged to the top of the stairs and dropped unceremoniously into my seat, reclining in my chair as Sasuke angled a peculiar look at me. It must have shocked him that I'd skipped my traditional procedural harassment of him, dropping my book bag at my feet instead of onto his side of the table.

"Haruno, what's got you all hot and bothered?" he prodded, mouth at that relaxed stage just before a grin. "It's me, isn't it? I know I'm gorgeous."

"Keep dreaming, Uchiha," I groaned, but in the end, I _did_ fan myself a little harder.

Mr. Hatake began class as soon as every seat had filled, and then he turned on us with the first question of the period. "Who read more than the required chapters last night? Raise your hands and keep them up. This is a very important survey." Everyone in the class raised their hands, save two or three people. I noted out of the corner of my eye how Sasuke seemed to twitch at the sight of Naruto, sheepishly rubbing the back of his head—I doubted the Uzumaki had even read a _page_.

"Nice, better than I'd hoped," Mr. Hatake said. "Who read at least to chapter seven?" Ten hands dropped. Not mine. Not Sasuke's.

"Nice, who read to chapter ten?" More hands went down. Not mine. Not Sasuke's.

"Okay, who _finished_ the book?" All hands dropped. Not mine, and—you guessed it—not Sasuke's.

He turned to look at me, and I did the same, our eyes locking in a swirling tempest of onyx and jade sparks. I felt that same electricity as the day we'd stood alone in Mr. Shiranui's room—"you're still annoying," Sasuke had said then, but all I'd heard was, "I want you to want me," in that smug, challenging way of his. He'd said it, and he'd truly gotten his wish. I _wanted_ him—I wanted him _badly_—and in so many ways, I knew he knew it_._

"Congratulations!" Mr. Hatake exclaimed, causing Sasuke to break our eye contact excruciatingly slowly. "You two continue to excel in my class. And seeing as how most everyone has completed more than half the book, I'll give you all two more days before we move along." Mr. Hatake turned to the blackboard with a stick of chalk, but not before directing a pointed look at the blonde knucklehead jock. "It would appear you've got a lot of ground to cover, Mr. Uzumaki. I hope you're a proficient reader."

As soon as Mr. Hatake set to work scratching info on the board, Sasuke dug into a book bag pocket and produced a folded piece of paper. I regarded it like a dead thing when he pushed it across the table, immediately recognizing it as the note I'd seen him scrawling in math class earlier that day.

I stared at it like it might bite me, unable to fathom that all along, he'd written it—not for Ino, but—for _me_, then I snatched it up, more eagerly than I'd intended, and unfolded it under the table.

_Haruno, _

_We've seemingly become something to one another that most would call "friends." I'm not really the friend-making type, so humor me here.  
My girlfriend says she made you a proposal—I get the feeling you're going to try out for the pep squad, and—God, just don't do it if you want to keep your soul. It's not often that I misjudge a person, but I'll admit I didn't peg you for the type. Which just goes to show that perhaps I've been too hard on you—you're the only person in this whole place with the intellectual stamina to argue with me and hold your own.  
_

_-Sasuke_

_P.S. __I only expect you're attending the pep rally this Friday. Kiba tells me he's received your confirmation. In true, typical "friend" fashion, I feel obligated to tell you that it might be cool to have you there—emphasis on "might."_

In the heat of my disbelief, I have to admit that seeing this side of Sasuke surprised me. His note had been longer than I'd anticipated—containing more words all at once then he'd said to me in our entire tenure as Lit partners—but it had been sweet, too. Cute, funny, friendly, but not overtly pleasant—God-forbid. It was just altogether very _Sasuke_ in its essence, down to the last graphite smudge where his hand had smeared the lettering. I read the note three times over before folding it up into a neat little square.

Holy cow. _The_ Uchiha Sasuke had actually admitted that in some shape or form, we were friends. I kept thinking: this is where it starts—this is only the beginning. If I could only get him around me in the right place at the right time, just _maybe_ he would see how perfect we are for one another.

But that was when it occurred to me, hearing Sasuke impatiently drum his pen against the tabletop. His note felt like a shard of glass in my palm, prodding and poking me, having all the answers. His words tumbled through my head, over and over again, like a relentless echo, and then I knew. I just _knew_.

_It might be cool to have you there, _he'd said.

I closed my fingers around the note. Yes, it had finally dawned on me. We'd both be there—we'd both be at the _pep rally_.

* * *

**Author's Note: Thank you for your continued support! I will be updating the revised versions of the remaining chapters, all the way up to chapter 7. Chapter 8 will be the first new chapter I've written since 2009. Please check the A/N at the beginning of each chapter to be sure that you are reading the revised version, as they may not be updated all at once! Thanks again!**


	4. The Pep Rally

**A/N: REVISED TJAM CH 4. Hello again, everyone! Thanks so much for continuing to read! I'll say again that I originally published this story in 2007. I must have been about thirteen, but I'm a college student now, and I felt I really owed it to you as well as myself to go back and improve the quality for your enjoyment. The basics are unchanged—characters and story are all basically the same. Overall, everything is much improved! Please enjoy!**

* * *

My grandmaster plan was already well on its way to fruition by the time Sasuke tore another page from his notebook.

I tried not to take interest in whatever he was doing, but in the end, my eyes kept drifting to his arm, rhythmically flexing in time to the bobbing of his pen. Naruto had been right about Sasuke's evident change of clothing—he wore a thin navy V-neck that clung to the muscles of his chest and his back, and every time he swept his hand across the page, his sleeve strained against the bulge of his bicep. His bottoms were basketball shorts, white with blue side stripes, and the tiny fan crest at the base of his neck was a subtle-yet-glaring intimation that seemed to scream "Look at me! I'm Uchiha Sasuke! I'm so rich, even my clothes are personalized!"

Clearly it hadn't come from Shizune's closet.

I prodded him in the shoulder with my pen. I don't know if I'd been expecting him to drop what he was doing and look to me, but if I had, it wasn't what I got. He largely ignored me—just went on scribbling his note, so focused on his task that I had to wonder if it was for _Ino_. I _longed_ to know, in fact, already imagining—hoping—_praying_ that my name was written on that page in Sasuke's neat penmanship.

Mr. Hatake had just instructed us to partake in a half hour of sustained silent reading—something we would be doing a _lot_ more often with all these extra _oodles_ of time on our hands, he'd said. He was just settling into his task chair and pulling out an orange paperback when I flipped my notebook open and wrote Sasuke a note.

_Sasuke,  
Why are you wearing boxers to class? Why are they silky?_

I passed it across the table, and for the first time, the sound of sliding paper seemed to catch the Uchiha's attention. He gave the scrap a cursory onceover before turning on me with a look that wished death. I flashed him a sheepish grin, and he slowly exhaled, using his pen to scribble back a hasty reply. He left the paper lying in the space between us, not even bothering to push it back, and returned to the note he'd been writing.

I leaned in a little closer, pretending not to feel him stiffen against me when our shoulders touched.

_Haruno,  
1. They're basketball shorts.  
2. You don't really want to know the answer to that question._

I could only _guess _what he'd meant by that, choosing purposely to ignore point two when my vision went slightly black. "I thought you played football," I muttered breathlessly, doing my best to hint that I was not the _slightest_ bit amused by his lewd implication—I wasn't sure if that came across as well as I wanted it to in my swooning tone of voice. It may have been a simple statement (albeit sexual), or it may have even been an innuendo, but my feigned disinterest didn't stop Sasuke's lips from tugging up in a ribald smirk. The blood rushed swiftly to my face.

I sat unmoving for the duration of the period, my hands clasped white-knuckle-tight in my lap. I couldn't get Sasuke's response out of my head, and it was a constant reminder that he was a bad boy with an agenda—did I like that or not? I was still trying to decide when the bell rang, signaling the end of yet another day.

I shot to my feet so fast, more than happy to "abscond," as Mr. Hatake so acerbically put it, and never in my life had "abscond" been such an apt description for what I wanted to do.

I didn't even make it to the bottom of the steps before I felt a hand, warm and frustratingly _delicious_ on my shoulder. I swallowed hard and turned around. "What do you want, Sasuke?"

He held out his hand. A square fold of paper was tucked between his index and middle finger, and I snatched it away, hoping to God I'd given him a paper cut. I didn't unfold or read the note until I was absolutely certain he'd left the building.

_Haruno,  
Nice miniskirt—really makes your, uh, _arms_ look good._

I flushed. Fervently. And I didn't say a word when Kiba found me in the hall, asked me if I was okay, and drove me home again from school.

* * *

I was on my way to lunch the next day when I found Kiba underneath our lunch tree, looking like a boar's head with his daily apple lodged in his mouth. Shino and Hinata were with him, prodding and teasing him about some subject apparently sensitive enough to make his cheeks burn bright red. It seemed that even the normally soft-spoken Hyuuga was too far gone to disguise her laughter. She was holding her sides in hysterics, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

"Hey, guys. What's so funny?" I asked as I stepped into the shade.

Kiba gave a start and hastily yanked the apple from his mouth, hissing at Shino to hold his tongue or he'd be eating a knuckle sandwich. "_Nothing's_ funny," Kiba snapped, glancing up at me before hurriedly averting his gaze. His face was flushed, and he wouldn't look me in the eye. "We were just talking about the game this Friday, right guys?"

Hinata had to cough into her fist now as she came down from her hysteria, barely managing to nod in compliance with Kiba's cover story. Shino made it clear he wasn't in the mood for playing ignorant—simply adjusted his sunglasses and silently laid back in the shade.

"Ino has a party at her beach house after all the home games," Kiba said. "Shino was just reminding us of some of the crazy shit that went down there."

"Nice," I said, humoring the Inuzuka. "Do you think I'm invited?"

"Maybe you should ask her now," Kiba said, and just as I was about to ask him what he meant by that, Ino blew past us like a hurricane, snatching me by the wrist and dragging me after her across the quad.

"Ino, what are you doing?!" I screamed, stumbling over myself to keep up with the rampant cheerleader.

"Just shut up and come with me!" she snarled, tightening her grip. "You've got some _serious _amplification to do, Forehead!"

Ino dragged me to the gymnasium in record time.

The squad was huddled in a tight ring on the floor mats —I suppose you could call what they were doing "_eating_," though it was more like watching birds feed in an aviary, the way they nibbled on granola bars and took sips from bottled water. Despite their deep involvement in one another, they turned at the sound of the doors flying open, rising to their feet simultaneously like a freaky cult of voodoo puppets.

"Ino, what the hell is going on?" I snatched my wrist back, rubbing the skin to get the blood flowing again.

"Did Ino _give_ you permission to speak?!" one of the girls asked—not a cheerleader, but a wannabe—the same brunette with the double buns from Mr. Gai's class. Her face was uncomfortably close to mine when she said this, and she only moved closer when I attempted to step away. Quite honestly, the way her eyebrow twitched at my silence only encouraged me to stay quiet, so I subtly shook my head before she snapped a vicious, "I didn't _think_ so."

"How the hell did you do it, Forehead?" Ino erupted, furiously pacing the mats. "How did _you_ make the cheer squad?"

My eyes slowly moved from Ino to the bun girl, whose face was still precariously close to mine. She seemed to stare at me with a look that behooved me not to keep the queen waiting, so I gave her a bored look and a listless shrug, just to piss her off. "I tried out. You should know about that. The flyer had your face all over it."

"Ehmagod!"

I reared back when the bun girl suddenly shrieked in my face. "Ehmagod, Ino, I remember!" she exclaimed. "You told Forehead to try out! That's how she made the team!" She whirled around to gauge her leader's response, and I took advantage of the distraction to take several steps away.

"Damn it, Tenten!" Ino snarled, pausing in her pacing to jab a finger at the brunette. "Don't be so _stupid_. No-fucking-duh she tried out. I didn't think she'd _make_ it, though!"

Hurt registered on Tenten's face. "I—_I_ thought she would…," she admitted, resignedly recoiling from the Yamanaka's rage.

As I witnessed this harsh exchange between "friends", I started to understand on a whole new level where Kiba was coming from when he'd said, "she's a bitch" about the platinum blonde cheerleader.

From experience, this was turning out to be the understatement of the year. Yamanaka Ino was _Satan_.

Ino crossed the mats until there were barely two feet between us, and she rolled her shoulder back as if to slap me across the face. I tensed instinctively and used my whole face to close my eyes, steeling myself for impact.

"For God's sake, you _wimp_, open your eyes and shake my damned hand," Ino spat, and I felt her snatch my hand and pump it before I'd even cracked a lid. "Congratulations," she said acerbically. "I neither like you, nor want you on my squad, but the game is this Friday, and absolutely _every_ member has to be there. I'll be _damned_ if I let you ruin this for us. Ninja vs. Bells is a BFD, you got that, Forehead?"

"Alright—alright, I _get_ it," I hissed, wincing at how tight Ino's grip had become on my hand.

"We have a _lot_ of work to do if we want to get you up to standard. So consider this handshake a semi-agreement _not_ to kill one another. Can you adhere to the terms?"

"As if _I'm_ the one you need to ask!"

I gestured behind her at the posse of cheerleaders and wannabes, glaring daggers and wishing death upon me. The way Ino looked at me, though, you'd think I was the only person in the room. I shook her hand back with belligerent force, more determined than ever to seize the opportunity. "You've got yourself a deal though."

"Not like you had a choice," Ino retorted, releasing my hand. "Principal Tsunade wouldn't have okayed you if you were a _total_ loser. As hard as it is for me to buy that, you must be capable of _something_. We just need to teach you the choreography for the dance number and a few basic cheers, but we've only got two—count 'em: one, _two_—days, Forehead, so we'll meet immediately after school and we'll work until _I_ say you can quit. As your team captain, it's only right that I take full responsibility as your new PT. Like it or love it."

"My new _what_?"

Ino rolled her eyes and had a laugh with her smug-ass girlfriends. "Private trainer—duh."

* * *

**Name: **Tenten  
**Date of Birth: **March 9 / **Age: **15  
**High School Year: **Sophomore / **Classification: **Wannabe  
**Notes: **Invasive of space. Hair-brained. Doesn't seem like she'd be so bad if she weren't so far up Ino's ass.

* * *

Becoming familiar with Ino had been disconcertinglyeasy.

For the next two days, I spent my mornings, afternoons, evenings, and midnights with her, losing hours of precious sleep—but "in sacrifice, learning lifetimes of precious things."

My mom took to her right away, which was either very typical or very unnerving—I still hadn't made up my mind. They were both first-class tabloid mavens, and even though Ino was naturally very vindictive, eating, sleeping, and sweating with her for forty-eight hours ensured that we both got a peek at her rare and elusive nice side.

My being "one of us" was unquestionably one of her favorites of the new facets to my character. Keeping that little detail in mind, we could gel like childhood friends.

Despite Ino and I developing this rather strange new kind of friendship—she still called me "Forehead" and now I called her "Ino-pig" after seeing the way she _devours _whatever edible thing you put in front of her—the team was so initially disgusted by my presence that the news of my cheer status became controlled information. Apart from Kiba, my mom, and the principal, no one outside the cheer family—not even the prodigal quarterback, Uchiha Sasuke, himself—had a clue that I'd been inducted. It was Ino's grandmaster plan to take full advantage of this fact and kick the pep rally off with an unprecedented bang.

"And what if all along you've been plotting to sabotage my big cheer debut?" I'd teased on Thursday night. We were lying on my bed watching all of Ino's favorite TV shows. "Your life is one huge issue of _Star_ _Magazine_. Having no secrets and scandals that aren't already common knowledge makes you _way_ too hard to blackmail."

She'd simply flipped me off and muttered something about ungrateful protégés.

* * *

Friday came fast and the student body went out of its way to really show support for the team. Classes were cancelled and we, instead, partied in the hallways, horns and streamers and free pizza abound.

Ino kept me under her claws for a majority of the morning, as if to keep it fresh in my mind that I was still her little cheer slave. She wouldn't let me near a soda to save my life.

Her good mood even went as far as exuding a certain pride and territorialism over me. It said she was responsible for the magic I would work later on in the night, and if I'm being completely honest, it felt good to be the object of her attention—a satisfying role reversal after two days straight of bowing to the whims of Queen Ino-pig.

I slipped through the crowd right as things started to get noisy. The halls of KHS were exploding with rap and rock music, booming, heavy bass lines shaking the floors. I'd been calling for Kiba when someone tapped me on the shoulder, gesturing towards the top of the double staircase.

Lo and behold, Naruto and Kiba dutifully made themselves look like idiots. Kiba was simultaneously guzzling two pop bottles while Naruto did the Sway with the science lab's anatomy skeleton. I appreciated it when he refrained from making any "boner" jokes, though he didn't refrain from twerking with the thing, to the best of his ability.

I caught Kiba's eye and gave him an exasperated look, to which he just shrugged and yelled for more pop.

By that point, I'd given up and walked away. _I might as well find Ino again,_ I thought, and when I'd made my way back to her, I immediately regretted it.

Ino hadn't moved an inch from where I'd left her, but sometime in the minutes before, Sasuke had come along. His Varsity jacket was draped over her shoulders, and he had his arms around her middle, his chin on her shoulder, whispering—what I could only guess were—disgusting, nasty things in her ear.

I thought about the note he'd given me then—the comment on my miniskirt, the other evocative insinuations that we'd exchanged throughout the week. Thinking back on our past interactions _in general_, I had to admit he'd never really hesitated to flirt with me—not after the Bunsen burner incident, anyway.

Did Sasuke really have _any_ feelings for Ino at all? Were they simply fuck-buddies, or did they even mean something to one another?

I couldn't help but squirm a little when I saw him nip her ear. He pressed a, ah, _fervent_ kiss to her lips—or her face. Her…_whichever_. Nevertheless, it looked repulsively _licentious_, maybe even a little bit fun—oh, you know—if I were into that sort of thing...

I quickly and respectfully averted my gaze, pressed my back to a row of lockers and waited patiently for the intimacy to end. I was respecting their privacy, yes—but more than that, I didn't think I could stand watching Ino be so _intimate_ with the guy I liked, entitled as she was.

I was about to up and _leave _when I saw Sasuke surreptitiously sneak off into the crowd. His head was ducked and his hands were shoved into the pockets of his jeans—as if he didn't want to be seen, much less stopped, by anyone. Now, this was a notion that didn't entirely match up with the narcissistic, attention-loving Sasuke I'd come to know.

I told myself to take this irrational reasoning with a grain of salt, though—after all, what did I really know about Sasuke? We'd been Lit and Chemistry partners for all of a week and spent 93% of our time together arguing.

Maybe Sasuke didn't "make friends," and maybe he'd even openly call Naruto or Kiba a "friend" before he would _me_—but I knew what I'd read. Sasuke had made it clear in his own evasive way that I could trust him—but I wanted him to trust me back. I didn't always want to be the "annoying-large-forehead-pink-haired-girl" like he'd indeed once christened me—possibly the _longest_ title I have ever held. I wanted to be someone he could recognize as an equal and go to in times of trouble.

I wanted him to call me _Sakura_.

After all that, I did the only thing I _could_ do—I followed him. He led me away from the revelry into an empty hallway, where I ducked behind doors and lockers, knowing in my gut he'd be upset if he caught me spying on him. He stopped at the end of the hall, pivoting uncertainly on his heel before pacing around in tight little patterns, wearing moats into the tile. The longer he paced, the more dejected he became. Though when he trudged up to a row of lockers and actually kicked a dent into one of them, I decided the appropriate adjective would have been _pissed_.

It couldn't have been a coincidence that as he spun around and pressed his back to the lockers, Simple Plan's "Me Against the World" came on and blared through the hallway speakers. I glanced heavenward at the ironic circumstance and was met by a pair of steely onyx eyes upon returning my gaze to eyelevel. "It's not polite to stalk people, Haruno—not the healthiest habit, either," Sasuke muttered, and I sheepishly stepped out from cover, realizing that my following him had never truly been a secret.

His black eyes beckoned me closer. His slate-blank expression begged to be filled. I walked slowly—apprehensively—and I had reached him as the music formed a tangled cocoon of sound around us.

"Sakura," Sasuke said, and I felt an unexpected swell of astonishment in my heart of hearts. Yes, I was overjoyed. And I'd even intended to step closer, but that was when he circled me. I felt him—his hands on my shoulders, pressing me hard against the metal lockers—and I was ensnared, trembling from head to toe with anticipation.

His head bent low and he ducked even closer, eating up the great difference in our heights. "Sasuke…?" I whispered.

First our foreheads touched, then our noses. For several seconds, he stood stone-still, just breathing in the essence of me, I of him. His eyelids lowered over stark onyx irises before rising once more, probing me for something I hoped to _God_ he would find.

"Can I trust you?" Sasuke finally asked. His voice was thick with an emotion I'd never heard in him before.

I responded eagerly to it, nodding feverishly—yearningly—my lips falling open on a sigh. I was fighting the urge to rise up on my toes and press our mouths together, feel his tongue on mine. As it was, I'd already thrust my chest out in a pathetic attempt to feel his hard, muscular body on mine.

God, I felt like an ass, the way my body responded so desperately to his presence—I couldn't even control it.

I wanted to reach out and grasp him by the belt loops, pull him flush to me and let him touch me right then and there—but it was by some _miracle_ that I refrained. "You're being so melodramatic, Sasuke," I breathed. The unusually low, drowsy quality of my voice surprised me. "Of course you can trust me."

_Yeah right, he must think I'm a slut._

Knotting my fingers into the fabric of his tee-shirt, I felt him shift closer, _deliciously close_, until his hips were pinning mine against the cool metal lockers. He dipped his head and went still as stone with his lips by my ear, his hardness unmistakable through the rough fabric of his jeans. The way the denim callously brushed the inside of my bare thighs made me sigh my pleasure into Sasuke's hair, in perfect partnership with his warm breath on my neck.

"I won't kiss you…_yet_," Sasuke murmured, and I couldn't help the moan of protest that slipped from me as he suddenly pulled away. Just that little word—"yet"—sent jolts of lightning to an intimate place, and I hoped he wouldn't notice the way I involuntarily squeezed my thighs together.

I collapsed in on myself, sinking to the floor, forced to sit there in a boneless heap as Sasuke retreated down the hall.

* * *

"It has to be a bolt from the blue," Ino explained, helping me shrug into a white tailored pea coat. She turned me around and efficiently buttoned me up. "Don't you let a _single_ person see what you have on under this coat, understand? It needs to be a _total_ surprise. It doesn't come off until the dance routine. I don't even care if they start calling you a flasher or a pervert or anything _totally_ humiliating like that—it just _doesn't _come off."

"Isn't it kind of suspicious that I'm showing up to the pep rally in nothing but a pea coat, though?" I fastened the last few buttons and followed Ino out to the car. We ran down the stairs and crammed ourselves into Kiba's Ferrari, Ino taking shotgun without even having to ask. I sat with Hinata in the back, waving goodbye to my mom who tossed us good luck wishes and embarrassing comments of "shake your booty, honey!"

Kiba already had the engine going and the top down, so it was an instantaneous getaway.

"It's only suspicious if they already think you're normal, Sakura," Ino said, in answer to my earlier question. "If anybody asks, you just ignore them like I told you to."

Immediately, the blonde began to toy with Kiba's radio. She switched indiscriminately through two dozen channels before pausing briefly on a Killers song. I watched her deliberate for all of two seconds before she moved to change it again. That was when Kiba slapped her hand away from the tuner, gently chastising her with a tone of mock-righteousness.

"Do we need to have The Killers talk again?" he asked, shooting her a look.

"Please no," Ino muttered, crossing her arms over her chest and sinking into her seat. "We'll listen to your stupid Murderers."

"Killers," Kiba corrected. Hinata giggled.

We listened to "Smile Like You Mean It" all the way to the pep rally—a tune that irrevocably reminded me of Sasuke, though I couldn't say why, excluding the obvious theme of surreptitious men and women who won't crack a grin to save their damned lives. I may not have known a thing about Sasuke on a personal level, but I knew he never smiled. He certainly never meant it.

I probably should have felt uncomfortable thinking about him while I was joking and riding in the car with his girlfriend, more now than ever after what had happened between Sasuke and me—or rather, what _hadn't_ happened. I just couldn't seem to feel guilty, try as I might, about the implications when that _one_ word continued to float around in my head—"yet."

"Yet" was becoming my new favorite word.

* * *

Konoha High School's pep rally was held at a local teenage attraction—a family restaurant, bakery and bar in the district called _Ichiraku_. As we approached the parking lot, I saw the large custom printed banner hanging across the storefront: "GO NINJA! SUPPORT OUR TEAM! KHS HOME GAME TONIGHT AT 7!" done up in bright reds and stark blacks.

Doubtless, with all the advertisement, the place would be packed. Kiba had a hard time finding a parking space, waiting several minutes on an old lady to get her bearings and back out. After a while, he couldn't help himself—he just started honking—and Hinata and I tried in vain to get him to lay off the horn. Old lady she may have been, but she could curse like a high school student, and she flipped Kiba off with a shriveled middle finger before storming away at a blazing ten miles per hour.

"Hurry it up, will you?" Ino shouted. "I need to cheer the opening line! Sakura, let's go!"

Kiba and Ino were instant crowd pleasers. The minute we stepped into Ichiraku—which looked like a whole new world decorated up in our high school's spirit paraphernalia—the place erupted in wild cheers and applause. I, on the other hand, caught some awkward stares in my white pea coat and cowgirl boots. It was all I could manage to shrug and avert my gaze when Ino shot me a warning glare. She grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me through the crowd, into formation where the rest of the squad was already waiting for us on the floor.

"It's _time_!" Kiba shouted, and he pumped a fist in the air.

Naruto, who was on the second-story, jumped up on the railing and started a countdown from ten.

In that time, Ino clapped her hands together and we stripped down to our red and white versions of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader uniforms with red shuriken appliqués and boots to match.

Right then "Fire Starter" threaded through the sound system, and Ino gave the command to go into her "crazy-sexy, super-hot, brilliantly-coordinated, choreographed" dance number. The boys hooted and hollered, Kiba howling and slapping the table when I got tossed nearly two stories into the air.

With all of that private training, Ino and I had come up with some really cool tumbling routines, and in so many words, Kiba later told me I "stepped up and stole the show."

I thought the Inuzuka's eyes would bug out of his head when the song had finally ended, and I noted with certain smugness the alarm in Hinata's, Sasuke's, and Naruto's faces.

We finished in a ten-man pyramid, with Ino, of course, on top, and we all came down for the rallying cheer.

"_That team rocks_!" she shouted, starting off the pattern of call and response. "They're elite! They're the ones that can't be beat! Sh-sh-shinobi! _Who?_ I said, 'Shinobi!' You want it! Jump on it! Yo' momma says we run it! _Go-o-o, _ninja!"

After all the fanfare, Ino was the first to congratulate me. She excused herself for a second to yell at the football players to eat some good food and stop making eyes at her girls, but then she turned to me and gave me a reassuring slap on the back. "You didn't do half-bad, Forehead!" she exclaimed, and when I shot her a grave look, she really surprised me by pulling me into a hug. "I'm kidding! Lighten up, Forehead, you did great!"

_Oh yes, maybe Ino doesn't hate me, after all._

"Maybe I don't hate you, after all," Ino said. "I didn't know what to think of you when I found out you'd made the squad, but it's been an interesting two days. I really can't hold it against you—your cheering speaks for itself. And hell, being on the squad already, you cut _way_ ahead of all the wannabes. You and me—we're BFFs from here on out, you got that, Forehead?"

"B…BFFs?" I stammered, feeling my face get hot under the glaring spotlights at Ichiraku.

"Duh," Ino said. "So I sure as hell better see you at my beach house tonight after the game. Anyway, I'm hitching a ride with Sasuke, so I'll see you on the field. Later, Forehead."

Not long after Ino left, Kiba and Naruto found me sharing sodas with some of the squad girls. "Still got time for the little people?" Kiba jested, shaking his hips while Naruto subtly hummed "Fire Starter".

"Knock it off," I said, slapping Naruto on the arm. I wagged my hips the correct way, pointedly gesturing for Kiba to watch. "You could really learn a thing or two."

"Don't shake your hips at me, Haruno," he retorted. "You think you're so à la mode!"

I just rolled my eyes and guzzled the rest of my pop. "So how did I do, boys? Cheerleader material?"

Kiba and Naruto clicked their tongues and flicked their wrists in true Valley Girl fashion. "_Fantabulous!_" they sang out in unison, and it was a dead ringer of our cheer captain pal.

"Speaking of Ino," I said, "She just told me she wants me to be her BFF."

"I don't believe that," Naruto said. "It's against my pious morality to believe that the devil has friends."

"Au contraire," Kiba objected. "They truly have struck quite the camaraderie. I've witnessed it with these virgin eyes." He gestured pointedly at his slit irises, to which Naruto blew out a snort.

"Pfft, _who's_ a virgin?" he asked, nudging Kiba in the ribs so hard that the Inuzuka lost his breath.

Kiba recovered and pulled the blonde jock's coat over his head. "We don't talk about that," he said, before digging in his pocket and pulling out his keys. "Fun time's over. It's _game_ time now."

* * *

It was cold and dark outside Ichiraku, already coming up on six-thirty, but the streetlamps cast little halos of golden light all around the parking lot. We walked around the back of the building to Kiba's Ferrari, Hinata going her own way to hitch a ride with Naruto.

It was just Kiba and me then, and we laughed and joked about our favorite parts of the pep rally when Kiba suddenly asked, "Are you cold?" He had already moved to undo the zip on his letterman jacket when I realized I was coatless.

"Damn it," I said, remembering that I'd left my pea coat in the restaurant. I told him so, at which he seemed to frown.

"I can go back and get it—"

"No, that's alright. I'll get it. Will you wait for me?"

I didn't give him much of an opportunity to object. I took off sprinting towards the entrance, catching a brief glimpse of Kiba's jilted expression, but he shrugged and said, "sure, why not…."

My fingers had just closed around the door handles when I heard the frantic yells echo off the empty parking lot. A cold chill blossomed in my body that spread all the way to my fingertips, now twitching nervously on the metal door handle. I instinctively, cautiously turned towards the source of the shouting, and maybe I'd been expecting a big man with a knife standing over a small, defenseless woman.

My theory hadn't been _exactly _wrong, but it hadn't been _right_, either.

It was Ino, looking worse for wear with her mascara running in black smears down her face. She was clinging to the arm of a reluctant Sasuke, moaning and sobbing into his letterman jacket. "You can't do this to me!" she commanded, weakly pounding her fist against the broad planes of his chest. Sasuke took her gently by the wrists, forcing a considerable distance between them as he knelt in close and lowered his voice.

"I gave you a chance, and you fucked it up, Ino. I'm not going through this shit _again_. It's time to _grow up_." Harsh and biting though the words may have been, Sasuke somehow managed to say them in a very gentle way.

Ino cried a little harder at the accusation, but it was the distraction Sasuke needed to shake her loose. Not that it had been _difficult_—Ino fell to pieces, sinking to the pavement on her hands and knees in a spectacle that I suspected was four parts histrionics and melodrama, only one part real emotional turmoil.

While Ino moaned and blathered, Sasuke awkwardly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, briefly checking his watch before gently warning her that if she didn't get it together, she was going to miss the big game.

"Do you want a ride?" Sasuke offered—I suspected to be polite—but she dejectedly shook her head and called him a fuck-face before wobbling to her feet.

By that point, Sasuke had gotten in his car and slammed the door, pulling out and breaking the speed limit before he'd even left the parking lot.

I glanced back at Ichiraku, debating whether it was more important to get my pea coat or go to Ino in her time of need—and as her "BFF," you'd think the decision would have been more immediate. Still, I hesitated, tossing a glance heavenward as if to ask God _why _He kept throwing me these curveballs, before I finally sighed and sprinted across the parking lot, calling, "Ino, you okay?"

The cheerleader snapped her head up and shook it furiously in reply. "Sasuke broke up with me," she snarled, wiping furiously at her tear-stained cheeks. "The fucking Uchiha dumped me on the night of the biggest _fucking_ game of the year. I'm going to _kill_ that fucking bastard—you just _wait and see_." I swallowed hard but said nothing, taking her delicately by the arm and leading her out back to Kiba's Ferrari.

He didn't even seem surprised to see Ino sobbing into my shoulder, and my guess was that he'd known about this longer than the rest of us. "Sakura," Kiba said, helping me settle Ino into the car. "I thought you went back for your coat."

I looked up at him then, honestly having forgotten it in the face of Ino's agony. "I was going to get it when I found Ino," I said, and then my full, rapt attention went to holding her in the backseat. "This is more important."

"'More important,'" Kiba reiterated, and there was no mistaking the small, bitter sound he made.

He dropped into the driver's seat and keyed the engine, flipped his lights on, and we were off to the big game.

* * *

Despite myself, I could barely contain my excitement once I'd stepped out on the field.

Dark as the sky was, the stadium was brilliant with Friday night lights. "This is it," I breathed, stunned by the beauty of the emerald green field, pristine white yard lines, and convulsing crowds of red and white—all that Konoha spirit actually made me feel proud to be a cheerleader.

In my head and in my dreams, I'd pictured things considerably differently. For one, I'd been expecting Ino to show a little more enthusiasm, but there was no helping the awkward circumstance the cheer captain had found herself in. It was clear that she went on largely affected by the breakup, and there was no amount of consolation or comfort food or even money that we could have given her to lighten her bitter mood.

I touched her arm and murmured an apologetic, "I'm sorry, Ino," with _some_ commiseration that I was beginning to think was probably undeserved. She brushed me off frigidly, and regardless of anything she'd ever said to me about being "BFFs," I felt like she _still_ abhorred me.

"Ino-pig, what strange mood-swings you have," I muttered, gladly putting some distance between myself and the blonde.

I'd just picked up my pompoms when the resident cool school genius, Nara Shikamaru, came over the loud speakers. "How troublesome… Yo, ladies and gents," he drawled, yawning into the microphone, and I was genuinely surprised to hear Ino laugh beside me.

"Move over, you _bum_," someone interrupted, and for a second there was a shrill of ear-splitting feedback as the microphone changed possession. "This is how you kick off a home game—GOOD EVENING, ladies and gentlemen! It's Akimichi Choji here, with resident shirker Nara Shikamaru, to bring you live commentary of the KHS Ninjas vs. Bells game tonight! Welcome to the hottest event of the season!"

He paused for applause, and in that pause, I may have heard the telltale crunching of chips into the microphone. "All the way from Sound, let us welcome the visiting team, the Oto High School Bells!" The Bells exploded onto the field, snarling and hooting and cackling like rabid hyenas. The away crowd rang out in applause that the Konoha fans swiftly overwhelmed, scowling, booing, making rude hand gestures. Several yelled, "what the hell kind of mascot is a bell, ya pansies?"

Across the field, Kin and her Oto pep squad started hissing at the Konoha fans, who only erupted into more naughty curses too obscene for me to reiterate. _Principal Tsunade failed to mention that the KHS fans aren't very sportsmanly, _I thought, trying to divert attention away from the vulgar crowd with some back flips and optimistic cheers_. _I was cringing in my uniform by the time Shikamaru took the microphone back.

"Mendosuke, you animals... And now, all the way from the gymnasium, our very own…Konoha High School Ninjas…."

"Damn you, Shikamaru…you're hopeless," Choji sighed, and I could almost _hear_ him rolling his eyes over the loud speakers.

Despite the underwhelming introduction, the rowdy crowd exploded into shouts louder than any I'd heard all evening. In my own excitement, I began to scream, too, the rest of the pep squad erupting into cheers, high kicks, and herkies all around me.

"Let's go, Kiba!" I shouted. "Let's go, Naruto! Let's go, Sasuke!"

Ino made an exasperated noise, pointedly pacing a few yards away from me before beginning her own cheering. " Let's go, go, _go_!" She was practically snarling, more on the angry, scary side of encouragement than the optimistic, cheery one. She proceeded to shout the name of every last player on the team—but never Sasuke's.

Not that I have much of a thing for _football players_—note the sarcasm in that—but I nearly melted in my cowboy boots at the sight of all those men, their white and red uniforms blazing as they exploded like a human battering ram out onto the field.

Kiba was the easiest to spot, leaping like a kangaroo into the air, holding his hands up in the universal sign for "love". Naruto ran beside him, ever the class clown, waving his arms like an air traffic controller and sporadically knocking his fists against his helmet.

It wasn't long before the crowd began to cheer for Sasuke, though, chanting his name in anticipation for his grand entrance. On cue, as if to give them what they wanted, the legendary quarterback and football prodigy exploded onto the field, flanked on either side by two players bearing KHS flags that trailed like war banners in their wake. Sasuke didn't waste his energy on rowdy displays of hysteria. It's not as if he _needed _to. He just raised his mighty fist into the air and the crowd ate it up, going out of their minds with raucous applause and punching their fists into the air in reply.

His name was a mantra on the lips of every KHS fan. They cheered, "Sasuke! Sasuke! Sasuke," and pretty soon, I was cheering with them.

"It seems the fans are awfully excited to see our star quarterback back in play this season!" Choji observed. "Welcome to the field, Uchiha!"

I clapped my hands in congratulations, and there was no mistaking the wink Sasuke shot at me when he turned towards the cheerleaders, pulled his helmet off, and pointed fingers, as if to say, _it's you, sexy babies. _You're_ the reason I kick ass_. I almost rolled my eyes at the corny gesture, until I noticed that the girls had stopped cheering and were burning holes into me with their irate stares.

Ino turned to me with black fury in her eyes, and it was all I could do to lift my hands in protest when she took two steps towards me. "Wait, Ino—it isn't what it looks like," I stammered, looking everywhere but her face—and that was when I saw my pink hair and my wide jade eyes magnified on the scoreboard Jumbotron. "Holy shit, can this get fucking worse?" I whimpered, and Choji's voice came across the loudspeaker as if to say, _oh yeah, it can. _

"Ladies and gentleman—what is _this_? It seems that KHS quarterback Sasuke has his eye on a foxy cheerleader! Who could the lucky gal be? Is it...KHS's much-loved captain of the cheerleading squad, Yamanaka In—mmmph?!"

"_Bad_, Choji," Shikamaru suddenly snapped, and there was the sound of muffled exclamations, a click, and slight mic feedback when Shikamaru must have slapped a hand over Choji's mouth and switched off the microphone.

In the silence that followed, there was no doubt that Shikamaru had quickly recapped the taboo circumstance to Choji, because the stadium rang loudly with his exclamation of, "Holy fuck! Right before the big game?!"

Maybe Shikamaru _hadn't _switched the microphone.

Ino looked utterly mortified. The camera panned slowly to her face, and she shielded herself behind her pompoms, screaming frantically for the box to "get that dumb thing off me!"

"Mendosuke… what my good friend Choji here _meant_ to say was, let's welcome our newest addition...Haruno Sakura."

My stomach churned when the camera panned back to me. I wish I could have been more excited, but I looked like I'd been hit by a bus.

"Perhaps," Choji amended, "We'll learn something tonight at Yamanaka Ino's beach house party...that is, _after we beat the Bells!_"

_Nice, _I thought, as the crowd began to cheer once more. The attention was off of me, but for how long?

I was beginning to think there wasn't any amount of diversions that could protect me from Yamanaka Ino's fiery wrath. If she didn't kill me first, I knew I'd have a lot of explaining to do later—or hiding, maybe—and here the night was still so young….

* * *

**Author's Note: Thank you for your continued support! I will be updating the revised versions of the remaining chapters, all the way up to chapter 7. Chapter 8 will be the first new chapter I've written since 2009. Please check the A/N at the beginning of each chapter to be sure that you are reading the revised version, as they may not be updated all at once! Thanks again!**


	5. The Beach Party Tryst

**A/N: REVISED TJAM CH 5. Hello to everyone who's come here via story alert. Just want to fill you in that I've gone back and rewritten this entire story. I promise I'm a much better writer than I was when I was 13 y/o, and my hope is that you'll be interested enough to backtrack and reread. You'll remember this was published originally in 2007, and five years later, I'm a college student trying to do this idea some justice. Additionally, I just want to inform you that this chapter, out of all of them, is the one I've changed the most. It will definitely have an effect on the updates to come (yes, there will be updates!), but the changes were much-needed. It may _really_ benefit you to read this chapter again (I've gotten better at writing sexual situations, too, so you may even benefit from it ;)) for the sake of continuity. Other than that, characters and story are still basically the same. Content in this installment is MA compared to all the M chapters before it. Thanks for reading! Please enjoy!**

* * *

I cheered for our team, elated whenever Kiba or Naruto were in the spotlight. I cheered even louder when Sasuke ran with the ball.

Not a soul in the crowd doubted our imminent victory. The Uchiha prodigy had managed to lead the team to a winning touchdown with seconds left to spare, and how he did it, I was still trying to work out. All I knew, as I did flips and high kicks on the sideline, was that I was starting to get a feel for this whole "football prodigy" hype that KHS was so wrapped up in.

Maybe I laughed at the ridiculous notion of a fan base for a high school football player, but now I'd be remiss to blame anyone for loving the guy. He was God's gift to man in nylon and spandex lycra.

_Damn_, _his ass is _fine_ in those pants_.

I can't deny that there was a lot of taunting when Kiba and Naruto went to shake the hands of the opposing Bells. I was just running up to the team, myself, when I noticed an Oto linebacker, a dark-haired boy with ZAKU printed in bold white letters on his deep purple jersey, take his helmet off and sidle uncomfortably close to the knucklehead halfback. Zaku drew back a fist, and I was the first to scream, "Naruto! Look out!"

Naruto didn't exactly _react_ to my warning, simply whipped his head in the direction of my voice. I was pointing frantically over his shoulder when Kiba shot out of the huddle, tackling the linebacker to the ground. The Inuzuka threw his helmet off and pinned down Zaku's arms, already yelling at Naruto to "get his head in the game, pull his head out of his ass, and beat some fuckers up."

"Hey, quit that!" Ino screamed, and we both exchanged panicked looks when the guy with DOSU on his jersey lunged into Kiba's dog pile. He lurched under the player's weight, head knocking into Zaku's in what looked like a bone crushing head-butt, but it was Naruto's turn to ram the Bell into the ground.

He tackled Dosu by the flank, and they hit the field in a tangled mess of flying fists and flashing canines.

Above us, the crowd erupted into furious shouts, heckling the teams for a fight to the death. I felt like I was caught in a UFC cage match when the field dissolved into a warzone, Konoha Ninjas grappling and tumbling with the Oto Bells in every direction. Even the cheerleaders were fighting, Bell Squad captain Kin running up to one of Ino's girls to rake her nails across her face and tug her by the ponytail into the ground.

I was more than happy to avoid getting punched by a rabid cheerleader, so I was slowly edging away from the fight when I saw Coach Jiraiya stomp onto the field. "TIME OUT!" he bellowed, and the fight suddenly ceased. Heads turned towards the KHS coach, a tall man with long white hair and red eye-black smeared down his cheeks. He had Sasuke by the arm as he crossed the field to the thick of the fight.

Kiba and Naruto both had their adversaries pinned to the ground and were looking curiously at their compromised quarterback.

"I'm disappointed in you boys," Jiraiya intoned. "Seriously, it's taking you _way _too long to win this fight! Get in there, boy!"

Sasuke made a sound of surprise when Coach Jiraiya slapped him hard across the back, pitching him into the brawl. He stood there in silent confusion, shooting his coach a look that seemed to say, _are you fucking kidding me right now? You really want me to fight? _Jiraiya just shrugged and gestured frantically for Sasuke to change the odds, and the Uchiha's face slowly took on a smirk. He whirled around and threw a punch, knocking a Bell instantly into unconsciousness.

Coach Jiraiya exited the field as both teams proceeded to ruthlessly smash one another into the dirt. This went on for several more minutes, me frantically wearing a walk path into the field, when the command to stop rang out once more. "ENOUGH!" it said this time, and everyone turned to look again, expecting a similar spectacle to that which we'd seen with Sasuke and Jiraiya.

Instead, Principal Tsunade was hiking over unconscious bodies in her stiletto heels and skirt suit, looking largely out of place. "This is not acceptable!" she bellowed, before the water boy ran up and helpfully provided her with a megaphone. "You've turned this field into a mosh pit! Do you understand how _bad _this makes Konoha High School look? No better than hoodlums, breaking out into a brawl like this—at a spectated, televised event, no less! And _you_, Coach Jiraiya! This is madness! What in the world do you have to say for yourself?!"

Coach Jiraiya held his hands up in a defensive manner. "Whoa, hey, wait a second—you know me, Tsunade. I wouldn't have let it go on if one of _my_ boys had started it, but scum like _that_ kid—" Coach Jiraiya jabbed a finger at Zaku, still pinned beneath Kiba. "—_that's_ what makes our school look bad. I mean, _really, _if you can't take the heat, get off the field, kid. Just don't punch my halfback, for Christ's sake!"

Zaku growled and hocked a loogie at his detainer. Kiba made a sound of disgust before slapping Zaku across the face.

"Yeah, that's kind of what I thought," Jiraiya grumbled, shooting Tsunade a hopeless look.

"That is hardly an excuse to condone this kind of _barbarism_," Tsunade snapped. "I saw you toss Sasuke into that brawl like it was a cockfight!" At the mention of the quarterback, she suddenly whirled on the center of the field. "And what about you, Uchiha, our '_exemplary_' football prodigy—what do you have to say for yourself?!"

Bells lay in heaps and piles around Sasuke's feet, groaning, moaning and coughing up blood.

"I had nothing to do with this," he quickly said, raising his hands to mirror Coach Jiraiya's defensive gesture.

"Of course you didn't," Tsunade growled, narrowing a look of skeptical ire at the quarterback.

He rolled his shoulders in a shrug and exchanged looks with the coach.

"Get this mess cleaned up _immediately, _or there _will_ be dire consequences!"

Right then, Choji's voice came over the loud speaker, providing the brilliant distraction we needed to usher the Bells off of the field. "Well, _okay_, then… That was a really killershowdown, folks, but, _uh_, let's talk about the game, shall we?" He and Shikamaru animatedly recounted the highlights of the game, diverting attention from the battered Oto team as they limped and dragged each other off the field.

When I turned to Ino, she was glaring at me, her cheeks burning redder than I'd ever seen them, and her pale blue eyes were obsidian in the darkness. "What was that wink, Forehead?" she asked me, clenching her hands into fists at her sides. "And don't tell me I imagined it. The whole fucking _stadium_ saw it."

I felt my stomach churn at the menacing sensation of Ino's fury, coating my skin like an invisible slime. "How should I know?" I stammered. "It must have been a misunderstanding. I'm sure he was winking at _you_." But as soon as I said it, she stepped up to push her fist in front of my face, the other wadded up in the fabric of my uniform. "Ino, let go!" I demanded, rearing back and shoving her hand aside. She shrieked and lunged at me, engaging me in this game of thrusts and dodges that went on for several seconds. "_Damn_ it, Ino," I spat. "Your obsession is unhealthy! Just take a Sasuke _chill pill, _would you?"

"_What_ was that?" she snapped, taking another predatory leap.

I brought my arms up to block the cheer captain, holding her at bay. "Anyone with a brain can see you like Shikamaru!" I grunted, straining my face away from Ino to protect myself from her raking claws. "Just get it over with so we can stop walking on eggshells around you. Your stupid mood swings are driving me crazy!"

Ino shrieked. "Ehmagod! Shut—_up_!" I prepared myself for the worst, but she surprised me by clapping a hand over my mouth, pressing a finger to her lips in the universal sign of silence. "Sasuke and I _just _broke up," she reminded me, voice hushed below a whisper. "If he finds out I've been talking to another guy, he's gonna _flip_. Not to mention, the cheerleading captain sweet on the resident genius? It'll _destroy _my reputation, do you understand? Just keep your big mouth _shut,_ and we'll call it even on the wink business, _got it_?"

I squirmed under Ino's weight, starting to feel my lungs burn the way she simultaneously silenced me and cut off my air supply. She didn't release me until I nodded, though, and then I sucked in a breath, panting heavily as I shot her an irritated glare. "You're being stupid, Ino. There's nothing wrong with liking an intellectual person. Sasuke's IQ is in the triple-digits, you know."

I couldn't tell whether she was embarrassed or angered by this comparison. "_Whatever_," she snapped. "I just want to get the _hell_ off this field and get a drink in me. I'll see you at the party. Don't be late or I'll murder you in your sleep."

* * *

I sat on the edge of Ino's bed, twisting her long blonde hair into a braid while she guzzled a martini and gossiped viciously about Sasuke.

I wasn't sure if I should be listening to some of the things she was telling me, because by then, her loose lips had sunken half a million of Sasuke's ships. I did my best to concentrate on the pleats, tuning her out as much as I could, but there's only so much you can pretend not to hear. "Just _watch_!" she told me, throwing her hands up into the air. Some of her martini sloshed onto my hands, and I curiously licked the beverage from my skin.

"_Ino_, this is straight gasoline with food coloring…!" I admonished her, and she misinterpreted my criticism as praise.

"I know, good shit, right? I was sayin' though, just _watch_! By the end of the night, Sasuke's going to try to _fuck _you, Sakura_,_ and I'll be _okay _with it!"

"Ino—!"

"I'll be _okay_ with it, youknow why? Cuz I'm independent, and cool, and _way_ popular—more popular than _that _bastard. He's out of his mind if he thinks I need him!"

I nearly fell to pieces in my mortification, stiffly squaring my shoulders and concentrating on furiously braiding the last of her hair. My cheeks were burning when I looked up to check Ino's reflection, and it was then that I saw her pale blue eyes had become glassy. I couldn't tell if the wetness was tears or just the after-effect of too many pre-bar cocktails. We hadn't even joined the party yet and she was already shitfaced—I hope she wasn't expecting _me _to play her babysitter.

I tied off her braid, choosing not to regard her prediction in favor of just letting her derail her own candid train of thought. If Sasuke wanted to get up close and personal with me, it was my own embarrassing business, and the last thing I wanted to do was talk sex with his ex-girlfriend—as if she hadn't already blabbed _plenty _to meabout that.

People often say things they don't mean when they're upset, anyway, but Ino took this to a whole new level. When she turned to look at me, she wasn't even the least bit angry. She was smiling from ear to ear when she thanked me for braiding her hair, and then she boarded a new train of thought all about the things she really loved about me. She shakily found her footing on the hardwood and started to get naked right there in front of me, shimmying clumsily into a bikini that I inevitably had to help her into.

_Mood swings, _I thought, trying not to show my alarm when she went into a long-winded spiel about how she really wanted to "do it" with Shikamaru.

I found myself looking heavenward _several _more times that night.

Ino loaned me one of her spare bathing suits—a designer black two-piece that made my boobs look bigger than they are. "That looks _hot_ on you," she said, as I dug into her wardrobe for a sheer beach sarong. I tied it loosely around my waist, taking solace in whatever I could get my hands on to cover up a little more skin. "You really shouldn't hide your bod, Sakura," Ino slurred, falling back onto the bed. "You're an accomplished gymnast with a bangin' ass."

Not that I didn't appreciate the compliment, but you can call me a prude all you want for wanting to keep my private parts _private_.

I helped her down the stairs and gratefully passed her off to Tenten, the designated driver—thank God _someone _had the sense to stay sober. Hypocrite that I was, I hit the bar first thing.

Four or five bonfires scattered the area around the beach house, and I found Sasuke among friends, listening to Kiba and Naruto boisterously reenact the fight with Dosu and Zaku. People might have found it strange that I was the only girl among them when I sidled up to the three jocks, drink in hand, but lately I noticed I wasn't really _about_ caring what other people thought. My reputation really couldn't get any more scandalous than Ino's.

Kiba was in the midst of telling a crude joke when we heard a feminine shriek.

In an instant, I'd gone from grinning to frowning, already facing in the direction of the noise. _How many times is this going to happen to me?_ I wondered, as students ran to take cover in Ino's beach house. Only the jocks and I remained in a tight semicircle around the biggest bonfire, cautiously searching for the cause of panic.

That was when we saw them—Dosu, Zaku, and a handful of Oto Bells coming over the hill.

Maybe it hadn't been so great of Choji to publicly announce the party location.

"Hey, Zaku," Dosu growled, sizing up the competition. "It looks like we've come upon the beehive."

Zaku smirked and cracked his knuckles. "Yeah, and now it's time to smoke out the little bastards."

Immediately, Kiba hissed at me to run.

I dropped my drink in the sand and made a beeline for the beach house, and I'd made it halfway there when the linebacker lunged for me, grabbing me by the wrist. He yanked me tight against his body, strong arms locked like vices around my middle. "Where do you think _you're_ going, sweetheart?" Zaku snarled, and I felt myself go rigid at the touch of his tongue on the shell of my ear. He squeezed me to him, drawing out my agonized yelp.

"Don't touch me, you pervert!" I screamed, twisting and yanking hard against his body. The more I struggled, the tighter he gripped me, and I could hear Kiba and Naruto arguing furiously over whether or not to attack.

It had essentially become a hostage situation, I realized, and if I wanted to get free, I'd have to rescue myself. I slammed my elbow hard into Zaku's ribcage, feeling his arms loosen their grasp on me but not entirely let go. I whipped around with the extra leeway, gave a snarl, and hiked my knee into his groin.

His body came away from me instantly, a curse to my name falling from his lips. That was when I made another break for the beach house, but Dosu was there to block my path. He shoved me hard into the swarm of Bells right as the Ninjas charged, erupting with shouts of "payback for the game!"

I was thrown helplessly into a solid wall of flesh, dodging flailing limbs and wayward punches as the tussle moved precariously close to the edge of the bonfire. I'd nearly squeezed from the pit of bloody knuckles when I felt someone make a fist around my hair. I tipped my head back and screamed when I realized it was Dosu. He yanked me closer, violently jerking me around before shoving me hard into the sand.

I heard my name called simultaneously by half a dozen jocks, but that was the last thing I remember before I hit the ground in a heap of tangled limbs.

Pain surged through my arm, springing biting tears to my eyes. I'd barely recovered from the fall before my mouth fell open on a sob—and please don't ask me why. I'd suffered much worse injuries in gymnastics, but I'd been nearly tossed into a fire, and the fear and adrenaline from getting knocked around by a mob of angry jocks made the pain seem _so_ much worse.

My whimpers cut through the commotion of thudding bodies and violent snarls, because the football players fell silent and turned to watch me as I sat up. My scalp burned from the abuse to my hair, and there was sand inside my bathing suit. I began to furiously wipe tears from my face, only to wail in earnest when all eyes never left my sobbing form.

It was in that instant that the snarls broke out again, but they were different this time.

Bells began to fly from the mosh pit of jocks, hitting the beach in little cloud bursts of flying sand.

It was Sasuke, ferociously shoving his way through, throwing bodies left and right, shoulder-checking them to the ground. "Get the _fuck _out of here if you don't want to die!" he snarled at the Bells, and they seemed to hesitate in the face of a threat they knew he'd probably make good on.

Despite that, Dosu didn't make a move to step away from me. He spat on the sand at Sasuke's feet, narrowing eyes as black as night at the Uchiha.

Big mistake.

Sasuke grabbed the arrogant bastard by the shirt collar and yanked his head down into his knee. Dosu's nose broke with a sickening crunch, and while it had been silent up to that point, the jocks and spectating party goers suddenly erupted into raucous shouts.

"You think it's fun to beat on _girls_?" Sasuke snarled, tossing Dosu's deadweight to the sand. He let the Oto player roll around in agony before swift-kicking him in the ribs. "It's not fucking _funny_, asshole. Especially when you don't let them _defend_ themselves, you fucking _degenerate_." He kicked him again, lunging onto Dosu's wailing form to deliver punch after punch to his face. This went on for mere _nanoseconds _before Dosu cried out for mercy—a request that fell on deaf ears as Sasuke never relented.

"Fuck, man, you're going to kill him!" one of the Bells wailed, rushing to intervene. He was fast enough to catch one of Sasuke's fists, but not fast enough to catch the one that slammed him in the stomach. The Bell fell to his knees in the sand and doubled over in agony. "W-wait!" he wheezed, clutching his middle, holding the other hand up in surrender. "We're gone, man! We're so gone!"

"Then why are you still _here_?!"

The Bell scrambled to his feet, and his teammates rushed to drag Dosu's limp body off the beach.

Kiba and Naruto assisted me with exaggerated delicateness, examining me for additional injuries. I showed them my wrist just as the partygoers started to filter back onto the beach, hoping to appease them fast enough that I could catch up to Sasuke, already headed down the shoreline. "Look, it's fine, see?" I assured them, but they went into immediate panic at the barest sign of swelling. "Dammit, I'm fine!" I exclaimed, and Kiba teasingly ruffled my hair.

"Calm your shit, will ya?" he said. "If we know Sasuke, he'll be here all night."

"Yeah, thank him later!" Naruto exclaimed. "We'll tell you if we see him! Right now it's time to party! Have some booze!"

It was easier said than done to take Naruto up on his advice. Outside the beach house, beer was in abundance, which I'd learned the hard way that I didn't have much of a taste for. Naruto brought me something from the bar, pink like raspberry lemonade, but with a stronger smell, and he and Kiba watched me with mock-suspense as I carefully tasted the drink, giving the nod of approval that seemed to send them over the edge.

"She's growing up!" they jested, exchanging fist-bumps and toasting their beers before Kiba asked me if I wanted to dance.

I glanced between him and the spiky-haired blonde, who seemed to shrug. "Oi, don't let me be the third wheel," he said. "I'll find an even hotter chick to dance with!"

"Good luck with that," Kiba retorted, and Naruto clapped him on the arm before blending into the convulsing crowd.

Kiba took my hand, and I reluctantly followed him into the horde, angling my body away from a multitude of bumping bodies outright determined to make me spill my drink. "Just finish it!" Kiba yelled, his voice nearly swallowed up by the blasting music and boisterous shouts. At first, what remained of my inhibitions warned me against consuming so much alcohol all at once—I was already slightly buzzed—but with the way the wall of bodies seemed to imminently close in on me, I saw no option but to slam it back in a single swallow.

"I'm going to be so drunk!" I yelled, and Kiba made a gesture that said he hadn't heard me over the noise.

After several failed attempts, it became clear that making conversation was going to be an impossible feat. I'd stalled as long as I could to avoid the inevitable, but we were surrounded by a sea of gyrating bodies—a manifest reminder that there was really nothing left to do but dance. Kiba made a gesture for me to move in closer, and when I did, he tentatively put his hands on me.

I think I'd been expecting it to feel awkward, standing so close to Kiba, but the second his hands caressed the rounded flesh of my hips, I was transported to another place—another time—where he was still the only friend I had—the only guy who'd ever told me he thought I was cute and funny and cliques be damned.

I let my hands slide up the hard muscles of his abs, daring to rake my nails through the thin rayon of his shirt. He let out a low hiss then, and I wasn't sure what possessed me to smirk. Kiba took this as a sign to reciprocate, I think, because I felt his hands move a little lower on my hips, his fingers dipping under the barrier of Ino's sarong. My arms had since come to rest around his neck, and we were moving together, our bodies pulsing to the rampant beat of the music all around us.

I really lost myself in it then, so adrift in a cloud burst of ecstasy and adrenaline that I hardly noticed when the alcohol took effect, nor did I remember turning so that my back was flush with Kiba's chest. His hands were still low on my hips when I began to grind myself frenziedly against him, and drunk as I was, it was surprising how well I kept rhythm to the music.

Kiba's mouth was close enough to my ear that I could hear his intermittent laughter over the music, but my lips were moving and I had no idea what the hell I was saying. I just let my head roll forward on my shoulders, hair a pink curtain to block out all of the distractions, and let myself feel good and incorrigible when Kiba grinded into me from behind. Through the thin material of Ino's bikini, his raging hard-on was obtrusive—though the connotation of that word is highly dependent on the amount of alcohol you've consumed. In my circumstance, I found myself with my hands on my knees, pushing back into his movements, and the moan that escaped me was completely irrepressible.

Now I know what you're thinking. What the _hell_, Sakura? What about Sasuke? Just hold on a second, we're getting to that part.

Naruto emerged from the throng of bodies with Hinata, of all people, and I think I would have been surprised to see her there if I were sober enough to recognize the shy girl. "Hey, Sakura!" Naruto shouted, cupping both hands around his mouth so I would hear him over the music. I let my head come up when I felt Kiba's body suddenly pull away, and I was standing there looking ridiculous, bent over my knees with my hair in my face. "I got some news on Sasuke's whereabouts! Guys told me they saw him down by the water!" He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the infinite shoreline.

I stood up then, my attention rapt.

Kiba shot Naruto a begrudging look that I pretended not to notice—even drunk, I'm not _totally_ dull-witted—and they began to argue over the practicality of letting me blunder after Sasuke in my drunken state. So caught up in their heated argument, I don't even think they noticed me push my way back into the throng of bodies. I rode the wave of flailing dancers and let it deposit me on the empty shore, and I staggered off in the direction that Naruto had previously indicated.

My walk along the beach had been pleasant, even in my stupor. The salty air stoked my awareness and filled up my senses, and in my heart of hearts, though I was blind drunk, I felt totally sober. I followed the roar of the ocean, lulled into an underlying weariness under the influence of so much liquor, and if I'd have looked back, I would have seen that Ino's beach house had vanished completely from view. I was so far down the shoreline that I wouldn't have even seen the bonfires flickering in stark contrast to the deep purple horizon.

It was around that time that I found Sasuke, a light speck on the infinite shoreline, dressed in a linen button-up with his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He wore white khaki beach shorts but no shoes, just sitting there with his elbows on his knees, a beer in his hand, staring up at the sky.

I approached him carefully, noticing the way he turned his head to glance at me as I approached that I must not have been as stealthy as I felt. "Hey," he said, as soon as I'd made it within hailing distance. I hadn't been expecting _him_ to be the first to speak, and I think this showed on my face as I dropped inelegantly onto the sand beside him. I hadn't meant to, but we were so close that our hips and shoulders touched, my hair falling across his arm.

"Hi," I said, angling my head to watch his eyes. He was focused intently on the horizon, so when he didn't regard me, I continued, "You know you're missing a _fantastic _party. What are you doing out here by yourself?"

"I'm thinking." Sasuke's eyes flicked to mine then, only for a moment, before returning to the sky. "And waiting, actually. I've been waiting for you for a damn half hour," he admitted, startling me.

"Really? For once _the_ Uchiha Sasuke is the one who waits with bated breath?" I teased. "This is a side of you I'm not so used to seeing."

He shot me an irritated look then, but there was an underlying calm to it that said he was only mocking me. "I never said anything about 'bated breath'."

"Perhaps you should have lied then," I told him. "That could have passed for a romantic declaration until you ruined it with your sarcasm."

He turned to look at me again—this time I felt it, because my face was turned out towards the ocean. There was no mistaking the way the air shifted around us, and the muscles of his arm flexed against my shoulder. I very slowly turned my head, noting that the distance between us was marginal—nearly nonexistent—closer than we'd ever been to one another. "The moment's not unsalvageable, you know," I added. "I mean, really…your actions speak for themselves. Apparently you have this soft side that likes long midnight walks on the beach, or why else would you be here? That alone gives you romantic bonus points."

He smirked then, teeth gleaming in what little light the moon gave off. I was getting close to making him smile, I realized, and promised myself that I _would_ before the night was over. "Sometimes I can't tell if you're out of your mind or just really stupid," Sasuke laughed, and I feigned injury at the insult, pressing my hand to my heart. "That's a pretty far-fetched interpretation of a stoic guy from a largely expressive girl. If you have a reason to be walking on the beach at midnight, it's probably not the same as mine."

"So we're not both here to get laid?" I joked, and I think it actually surprised him.

His eyebrows shot up at the implication, and in my drunkenness, it was all I could do to grin toothily at the Uchiha.

"Maybe I was wrong," Sasuke marveled. I leaned into him in my anticipation, eyes hungrily devouring the sexy curve of his lips as he smirked. "Either you're out of your mind or _incredibly _perceptive_._"

I pounced then, and for the second time that night, I think I took Sasuke by surprise.

Despite my role as the aggressor, I still whimpered feebly at the silken pressure of Sasuke's lips beneath mine. There wasn't even a fraction of a second's hesitation before he responded to my kiss, and in his, I could feel the nature of the beast—a predator, so sure of his birthright that he never hesitates to take what he wants.

I'd known for some time then that he wanted _me_, but experiencing it still made me question if I was awake or in a dream.

I opened myself to feel more of him, the fleeting touch of his tongue on my bottom lip the intuitive signal for what was to come. Immediately, he deepened the kiss, hand cupping my jaw, fingers knotting gently into the hair at the nape of my neck. His other hand moved to brush silken patterns along my arm, raising goose bumps in its wake.

I crushed my lips to his with a fervor that he matched, immediately climbing to meet my growing eagerness, every step of the way.

His hands became more liberal, roaming my skin, and they sent shockwaves to pool at the juncture between my thighs. He hadn't even touched me anywhere intimate_, _and already I was falling to pieces with each modest stroke. He had me aching with a powerful anticipation for more, so it's no wonder when he asked me, "Do you mind this?" and pushed me down onto the sand that I mutely shook my head in answer.

The sensation of his body becoming flush with mine through our clothing, so deliciously solid and muscular and just so _Sasuke _in his essence, helped me find my voice in a moan. I breathed his name into his shoulder, my hands going to his hair.

"Good," he murmured, bending to kiss me again.

It lasted longer this time, because I liked the taste of him—like citrus and beer, which I noted didn't taste half as bad when mixed with the flavor of him.

"Are you drunk?" I murmured—I'm not sure why it would have mattered, given how plastered I already was, but he still shook his head as he suckled hungrily at my neck.

"Didn't even drink a whole beer," he admitted. "Definitely not more than _you _drank."

I blushed at that, letting him take my hand and press a kiss to the inside of my injured wrist. "I'm not drunk," I protested, making good on my earlier desires to grab him by the belt loops and pull his hips down to mine. I arched my body into his, hitching one leg over his hip, and hooked a foot behind his calf to feel his erection tight against me, once more _obtrusive _through the thin scrap of linen that was his beach clothes.

"That's good," Sasuke murmured against my skin, and I'm not sure if he meant the sensation of our groins pressed together or my false claims to be sober. Sensing this, he continued, "Or I'd feel bad for taking advantage."

I laughed then, raking my fingers down the flesh of his bare torso where his shirt had since come open. In a moment of audacity, I gripped his hips and tugged him in a rocking motion against me, creating friction in new places that made my lips fall open on a sensual moan. Even Sasuke couldn't repress a verbal reaction, his breath leaving him in a shuddering exhale at the sudden, unanticipated pleasure. "Who's taking advantage?" I retorted, breathless.

He took the invitation then, rocking back slightly before leaning into me again at the hips, and I let my head fall back, exposing my neck to him. The gesture was both submissive and assertive as I demanded to be kissed, and he obediently dipped his head, tenderly lapping at the flesh, his hands massaging my hips through the fabric of my bikini. In three thrusts, his hands had traveled the length of my torso, up the flat plane of my back to guardedly toy at the thin knot of strings there.

I gave him my nod, but he hardly needed it, to undo the tie on my bikini top. I don't remember ducking out of the halter, but in less than a second, the scrap of cloth lay beside me in the sand. I made a fist around the fabric of his shirt, without even the smallest desire to deny him rights to my body. I lazily rolled my head back, mouth falling open on a sigh when his thumb brushed the firm flesh of a nipple. He took the other between his lips.

He leaned into me again, and I convulsed blissfully in the sand, eyes closed, head back, still moaning his name when I heard the voices on the wind.

"Hey, they're over—oh God…Hinata, don't look!"

My eyes snapped open, and I instinctively wrapped my arms around myself to hide my naked torso. Sasuke's weight lifted off of me, and he was already out of his button-up, pulling it around my shoulders when Naruto and Hinata cautiously approached us.

"Geez, sorry, Sasuke-bastard," Naruto murmured, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. If it had been lighter, I was sure he would have been flushed to his collarbones. "Hate to be a cock-block, but Hinata was worried about Sakura. Just wanted to make sure she didn't fall into the ocean or something. Clearly there was no cause for alarm—we can see she's in…capable hands…." He barely suppressed a snort when Sasuke shot him a look that could kill. The blonde running back quickly raised his hands in a defensive gesture. "Yeesh, fair enough—note to self: don't cock-block the Uchiha."

* * *

Naruto and Hinata surprised me by walking with their hands clasped between them. I, on the other hand, leaned into Sasuke with the brunt of my deadweight, so plastered I could hardly support myself as we made our way back to the party.

It wasn't long before we could see flames flickering on the sand, and the closer we got, the louder the music became. The jocks were partying around the bonfire, tossing a football around and kicking up sand when we approached, and heads instantly turned our way.

Maybe it was the sight of Sasuke shirtless that made several people ooh and ahh, nudging each other knowingly like they knew what we'd been up to.

Honest to God, they probably did, because my bikini top hung limply from my fingers at my side, and Sasuke's button-up was fastened loosely around my body.

I glanced around in a daze, easily picking out Kiba, hunched over his knees on a log around the fire. He rested his elbows on his thighs and nursed a beer, looking more disheveled than he had when I left. He glanced up at the playful razzing, briefly holding my stare before breaking eye contact. If there was something behind his evident reticence, I was too drunk to figure it out.

I reached up to tap Sasuke's shoulder, capturing his attention.

He bent low to put his ear by my mouth, and I playfully licked the shell of his ear before asking him to bring me another drink.

* * *

**A/N: And there you have the _much _improved revision of chapter 5. If you're a returning reader, you'll notice that I added the Kiba x Sakura dance part; I made Sakura drunk; I got rid of the cave scene; Sasuke and Sakura went _much _farther than they did in the original chapter 5, and I also tossed out the much-loved "Dude…_what_?" line. I know, sorry. I tried to think of a way to keep it in, but it just wasn't going to happen. I'm trying to create more of a love triangle with Sakura, Sasuke and Kiba than I did the first time I wrote this story. Hopefully there's a good sense of that. Anyway, my point is that there have been many necessary changes made to this chapter that would inevitably affect the chapters to come. I made up my mind, because of this, to just delete chapters 6 through 8 in favor of revising them and publishing them in the normal fashion. Seeing as how the FF bots do not send out alerts for replacing chapters, this seemed like the better alternative anyway. You no longer need to look for an indication that the chapter is revised. All chapters from here on out are freshly updated. So, as usual, thanks for your continued support! I really hope you enjoyed this installment, because so far it's been my favorite to write.**


	6. Chick Fight!

**Hope I didn't keep you guys waiting _too_ long. First week of college and ROTC are done! I took advantage of the Labor Day weekend (kind of; truthfully, I got most of this chapter done between 10pm and 2am on Monday into Tuesday morning… I guess I write more material when I know I ought to be doing more productive things (such as _sleeping_)). Anyway, beware of smut, and more to come. (See what I did there?) As always, this fic is AU and extremely OOC. No surprises there!**

* * *

It seems like the most important advice in life is always the hardest to get behind.

Not that it takes a rocket scientist to figure out what's meant by "word travels fast," but that expression is as half-assed as they come. If you're not scratching your head from the profoundness of it, you're scratching your head from the sheer ambiguity—okay, yeah, they say word travels fast, but should I set my DVR?

From trial and error alone, I guess _yes_, because the answer to the _how _aspect of how fast word travels is apparently _pretty damn fast_. Sasuke and I had been an item for all of twenty minutes when Ino came raging out of her beach house, fists clenched and arms milling, ready to knock me into oblivion.

I'd been hovering around a bonfire with half a dozen jocks—Sasuke's friends Izumo, Iwashi, and Kotetsu among them—discreetly shielding myself from the breeze behind their tall, burly bodies.

That was when the wordless, maniacal war cry rang out in the salty ocean air. Ino's body hit me like a wrecking ball, knocking me to the sand before I even knew I was down. My head lolled as she tore into me with raging fury swipes, raking welts across my arms and the exposed planes of my chest.

I'd barely managed to get my legs between us, my hands on her shoulders to hold her at bay, when I gave her a lopsided shove. Her body flung off of me in a sideways arc, hitting the beach in a cloud burst of sand, and she rolled away in a tangled mess of limbs and braided hair.

Despite what anyone will tell you, Zui Quan is _not_ actuallyperformed under the influence, so _no_—I wasn't about to go all Drunken Fist on Ino's ass. Instead, in my immediacy, the only _viable_ option seemed to be to trap her beneath my weight—pin her to the sand and stop the fight before it could escalate.

Really, you'd think I'd had _enough_ brawling for one day, but as I lunged atop the blonde, hooked my legs under her knees, and wrestled her flailing arms into the ground, I couldn't breathe. The world was spinning. Don't even get me started on the spritzer—I'd had _way _too much—and I was quickly nauseated by the way Cheer Captain Floozy tossed and pitched beneath me, a rampant sea and I was the skiff.

Her arm slipped loose, and my reflexes failed me. Ino's long, manicured nails hooked me right under the temple and dragged deep, angry welts across the right side of my face.

I was acutely aware then that, all around us, the crowd had erupted into cheers and howls, the gratifying sight of first blood a cure-all for idling boredom. I should have expected them to look at me like a meal—as Ino would have put it, chick fights are a BFD around KHS—around _anywhere_, really—and I was a star attraction.

Regardless, I felt like an oblivious pit bull in an underground dogfight, the predatory manner in which the bloodthirsty spectators leered, hissed, and booed, encouraging us to rip each other to shreds. This was turning out to be the enactment of a very uncanny Blondie song, or I was carving a niche for myself in women's MMA.

It was the longest two minutes of my life—those two minutes I spent utterly fending for myself against Ino.

Damn it, I shouldn't have been so arrogantabout joining the cheer squad. I shouldn't have been so elitist towards Shino and his nasty bug habit. I was totally convinced by my dumb luck that this was karma—my terrible, _terrible_ karma—coming back to bite me hard on the ass cheek. I was a big-time hypocrite—a _sinner_—and believe me, sins don't go unpunished in the misery business. And _fuck_, was I miserable.

I deserved it, though, because I knew better. Yet still here I was. What was it that Franklin said? _Temperance_—the first item on his list of the thirteen virtues to live a miserable life by. "Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation." I'd been drunk as hell and I'd _still_ turned Sasuke towards the bar to fetch me a drink. Bless his icy heart, he'd taken it like marching orders and set out for my disgusting, illicit indulgence.

Meanwhile, I dutifully took my un-virtuous punishment, fending for myself well into the third minute of our epic, dramatic struggle for goodness of virtue in its triumph over evil.

Ri-i-i-ight… We were both blotto. So what next for me then?

Hinata, wherever she was, was too timid to be a good fighter.

Due to new, totally unexpected developments, wherever the Hyuuga was, Naruto would be, too. That left only one.

Esteemed Obiwan Kiba—my one and only hope (and incidentally karma's _coup en traître_)—the final ace in the hole—the back stab—the ultimate bitch slap. If I were him, I'd let me rot. So it didn't really matter if Kiba had left the beach, and it didn't matter if he'd gone inside. For all I knew, he may have been mixed into the crowd of spectators, letting me get what I had coming.

Regardless, I found myself reasoning that there was _someone _on that whole stretch of beach with the human decency to break up a totally unfounded, drunken chick fight, right? There was _someone _not totally absorbed in sandy bikinis and bouncing, jiggling thighs and breasts…right? There was _someone_ who would mediate, grab Ino and drag her back into her beach house, sit her down on the bed and make her a cup of Joe—_right?_ One tiny, simple act of mercy was all I wanted. There was _someone_.

RIGHT?

Fuck no. But you would think.

Perhaps it was that thought alone that triggered the universe's silent mockery, because little wannabe Tenten, murderous killing intent in her hate-filled eyes, clogged over through the sand and made a fist around Sasuke's shirt. She yanked me off the furious blonde with so much force that the buttons popped off, scattering the sand in a hail of little plastic pieces. My arms milled back and slipped free from the sleeves, and I fell onto my back, topless in the sand.

Now it was the cheer captain, the newbie, and the ditzy little tart engaged in a 2-on-1 head-to-head face-off to the death. As for me, I was half-naked, shivering, blind drunk and less in the mood for dying than I'd _ever_ been in my life (though by that point, I seriously might have gone for a nap).

I scrambled backward down the shoreline, knowing how to run for my life, even when inebriated. But Tenten, in all her sober glory, was faster and more precise than my sloppy movements. She pounced on me—started ripping at the sarong—hooking blood red painted claws under every scrap of clothing.

I tried to tune out the cat calls and separate her spindly fingers from my clothes, but bad multi-tasker that I am, I lost focus almost immediately. My eyes flew to the circle of raging, convulsing high school students as solo cups, beer bottles, condoms and bikini tops just _rained_ down all around us, coating my body in a psychological film of filthy, unhygienic ooze.

God, what was this—Girls Gone Wild?

It was one thing to block out the revelry, but I drew the line when Tenten ripped the clasp from her bikini halter. The top fell from her chest as the wannabe drew back with her right hand, smacking me hard across the mouth. My face went totally numb, but there was no level of pain that would have stopped me from my panicked screech.

"Get off of me!_"_ I wailed, at the first sight of her naked tits mere inches from my face. I thumped and wriggled in the sand under the wannabe's body, swinging a closed fist with the force of my entire body in a lumbering arc aimed at her face. The heel of my hand made contact with her jaw, transferring enough force to totally upset her balance. When I bucked my hips into her thighs, she fell off of me into the sand.

I was already scrambling after Sasuke's discarded shirt, my breasts spilling out of my palms in a vain attempt to hide my nakedness. I barely made it a yard when Ino tackled me to the ground, and I sprawled forward in a spread-eagled stance, catching a mouthful of hair and sand.

Damn it… It didn't escape me either, two stiff pebbles pressed against the softness of my back, that Ino was topless, too.

"_I'll be okay with it._"

Isn't that what she'd said?

Bullshit. Ino sure had a funny way of giving me her blessing, but like most things, she took her affairs to a whole new level of overblown ridiculousness. The debacle may have been an ordinary chick fight at the start, but it had evolved into Lindsay Lohan's sex tape by the time Ino and I were front to front, rolling half-naked in a bed of sand.

I did the lowest of many lows then—maybe not _the_ lowest, but I could've done _that_ too—reaching up to grasp Ino by the braid. She already knew what I was going for and moved to push my shoulder to the sand, but I'd already twisted her hair around my fingers, knotting it up in my fist. Her own gesture worked against her, because she jerked forward into my body, head twisted at an angle that _couldn't_ have been comfortable.

I could have yanked a _lot_ harder next—it wasn't like I was trying to rip her hair out—but I pulled with force enough to steer her body like a car, throwing her screaming and thrashing off of my body, into the sand.

I'd _finally_ won the advantage, I thought. But let me tell you: famous last words.

Ino gave an enraged snarl, claws digging crescent moons into the skin of my arm, but it hardly registered in my head that I was in any pain. It was the warm wetness on my skin that caused me to panic—before I could blink, Ino had sunk her pearly white teeth into the soft flesh of my forearm, biting down with the crushing force of an alligator's jaw—believe it; you read that right. She _bit _me.

Pain rocketed through the bone; every nerve ending lit up like fire, and what started out as the initial, mild sting of nearly half a dozen bees quickly grew into the burning inferno of knives plunged to the hilt. I yelped like a kicked dog, a desperate sound that hushed before gradually rising into a deafening wail.

I didn't _stop_ wailing, even after Sasuke's shirt fell protectively around my shoulders. I'm not entirely sure I _ever_ stopped wailing, but the jock himself was beside me in the sand, the firm muscles of his arms rigid barriers around my malleable body. I desperately cried his name, falling against him as my body was racked with shivers and agonizing pulsations.

Between the throbbing in my arm and the throbbing in my head, gone fuzzy with too much booze, I wasn't really sure _what _I was feeling—what was real and what was imagined. I hadn't noticed Ino let go of my arm, but it hurt as though she'd left a few of her teeth behind.

I didn't know where I was. I didn't know my name. I couldn't remember where I'd parked my car—couldn't remember the _color_ of my car—couldn't even remember that I didn't _have _a car.

Not until Sasuke lifted me off the sand, carried me over the hill, and deposited me into his Lamborghini did I regain the most trivial of instincts—the most miniscule grasp on reality—and even then, all I wanted to do was _sleep_.

* * *

It wasn't an extremely restful sleep.

I tossed and turned in Sasuke's passenger seat until I opened my eyes again, and then I _really_ didn't remember how I'd gotten to a hospital.

It stank of latex and antiseptic, and when my eyes soaked up the migraine, I saw I was swathed in a cocoon of cottony white light. Beneath me, a bed with a mattress was firm but lumpy, and my head was lodged against a pillow at an angle that was more painful than restful.

I eased into a sitting position, and my body protested every flex, but I managed to swing my bare feet off the bed in a rigid arc—a small movement that I _instantly_ regretted. The vertigo in my head swirled south like a hurricane, all the way down to my toes, and every limb sprang to wrap protectively around my skull.

My arms cradled my face, my hands laced tight by the fingers behind the rat's nest of my hair. I drew my knees to my heaving chest, heartburn like a knife lodged between the bones in my breast.

Fabric rumpled against my skin, and I was reminded that someone—presumably Sasuke—had dressed me in a man's khaki pants, long legs rolled into cuffs around my ankles, while I'd been unconscious for the duration of my hospital stay. Sasuke's linen shirt was draped loosely over my shoulders, buttons enough to keep it fastened over my chest, and the too-long sleeves were bunched up at the elbows.

It wasn't _much_, but it was a reminder, nevertheless. Sasuke had been there at the very brink—the very edge—of my memories, mere moments before I'd slipped away.

I waited for the vertigo to subside before I finally, slowly, unraveled myself. There was an infernal burning behind my eyelids when I closed my eyes, and when I moved to stretch, the skin pulled tight and started an agonizing twinge in my arm.

I looked down then, greeted by eight new stitches. I made a small sound, regarding them like they were good friends and had been there all my life. Even so, I found myself blinking furiously, willing them away.

"Could this night get _any_ worse," I muttered. It wasn't so much a question as it was a prediction—a definitive one—that the night probably, invariably, could _always_ get much worse.

"It could get _much _worse."

My head snapped up—more vertigo swirled and pooled in my toes. Sasuke was leaning on the far wall, exuding his usual bad boy/cool kid aura. His arms were stubbornly crossed. His hair fell in stark black slants across his forehead. He'd changed into a thin gray V-neck since the last time I'd seen him, but he still wore white beach shorts and a pair of light gray slip-on Vans.

"But it probably won't."

I squinted at him under fluorescent white lights, the skin of my face pulling extra tight as I forced myself to smile. "Riddle me this, Sasuke—we're in a metropolitan hospital—the hell I gotta do to get a couple aspirin around here?"

He was already on the brink of one of his trademark smug-ass smirks—a gesture that would have irked me once. Now, all it did was stir rampant flutters in the pit of my stomach, inundating me with epidemic warmth. "You've had two already," Sasuke informed me, gesturing at the paper cup on the bedside table.

It was definitely empty, but I turned it upside down, willing a pair of pills to fall out into my open palm.

"Leave it to you to get dragged into a three-way topless chick fight to the death."

"It doesn't sound heroic when you put it that way," I muttered, shooting Sasuke a dry look.

His smirk grew infuriatingly more arrogant—this time the flutters coiled lower, forming a pulsating heat between my thighs. "It's not heroic _any_ way you look at it—you got sewed up for a bitchbite. One hell of a story to tell your mother, though_._"

"My _mother_…." I flushed hotter then than I had all night, pressing the heel of my palm to my pounding temple. "I completely forgot about Mom," I muttered, and the sound of it in my ears was ten times too loud, despite being less than a whisper. "I can't believe Kiba let me _drink_ that much. I'll definitely be hiding my 'bitch bite.'" This reminded me of half a dozen _other_ things I'd need to hide—the tender hickeys on my neck, the welts from Ino's nails, and my blatant drunkenness among them. "Easier said than done, but if I want to live, she doesn't hear about _any_ of this."

He didn't humor me at all—simply suppressed an arrogant smirk when the nurse came in, bandages to wrap my arm tucked away in a little First Aid kit. I stayed silent and impossibly still, desperate to disguise the fact that I was still heavily under the influence, but I could tell by the way her lips pressed together and the way she scrunched up her tiny nose that I reeked unmistakably of spritzer.

It was a wonder she didn't call the cops, and I vaguely wondered if the Nightingale Pledge applied to not tattling on underage drinkers.

After she'd left, Sasuke turned to me with a flippant, "We're done here."

I slid off the bed and wobbled after him down sterile, bleach-scented hallways, the tile ice-cold under my toes. I expected him to stop at the reception desk, but he walked right by, ushering me carefully, like his child, through a pair of revolving doors.

"Wait, you paid my hospital bill?" I'd asked him—several times—over and over until he led me to his Lambo. He'd taken my hand to guide me safely around broken glass and uneven landscaping, and he was opening the car door just as I made a fist around the thin material of his tee-shirt. "I'll pay you back, Sasuke. Just tell me how much it cost. And how _late_ is it? For fuck's sake, your parents are gonna be _pissed. _At least let me pay for the gas until you can forward me the statement. I swear I'll make it up to you. And these pants—I'm putting creases in them. Where do you get your dry-cleaning do—"

He whipped around and silenced me with a kiss that didn't just _trap_ the words in my mouth—it _slayed_ them—and I couldn't remember what I'd been about to say only nanoseconds before.

My heart took flight on a wild, euphoric wind, but rigid, invisible fingers clenched like talons around it, keeping me grounded in reality. His solid, warm hands moved down my back, pulling me flush against the hard planes of his chest. He pressed his fingers firmly into the small of my back, tilting our hips together, and I felt my legs grow weak beneath me. When I let slip with a tiny moan, he broke the kiss and drew a breath, a thumb come up to brush stray hairs from my face.

Against my lips he murmured, "Just shut up, will you? You talk _way_ too much."

And then he kissed me again.

* * *

How in the _world_ Sasuke mustered the courage to drive at such frightening speeds was beyond me, but one thing was certain—he was a regular NASCAR champion with an immaculate driving record. He'd been maneuvering the streets at a solid twenty over the speed limit when I thought to ask him, "You're sure this is alright?"

It was just turning eleven o' clock, and I'd practically begged him to take me out—_anywhere _but home, where I knew Mom would just be settling into bed. I had a good two hours until curfew, and I was nowhere near prepared to answer all the questions she'd surely inundate me with. God forbid I catch her still awake, or _I_ may never wake again.

Sasuke floored the gas pedal to beat a turning traffic light, clearing the intersection just as yellow flashed to red. "My parents are out of town," he answered, leaning to check his blind spot before cutting smoothly across four lanes. "We can kill some time at my place. I'll have you home by quarter 'til."

"Thank you _so_ much, Sasuke, you're a life saver, you know that?"

He shot me a flat look. I pointedly disregarded it. By the way his hands clenched around the steering wheel, jaw flexing in annoyance, I knew he was trying not to dwell too hard on the literalness of my statement. I cracked a smile and wiggled deeper into the heated seat, luxuriating in the supple leather. "Maybe we can watch a movie…or something."

Sasuke was already taking a turn that led down a mile of Main Street. Broad, smooth roads, boulevards and tower-like trees paved the way past a country club into one of the more affluent neighborhoods in the area. I stared out the window as we flew past Cape Cods, chalet bungalows, faux chateaus, and houses of a dozen other architectural styles I'd only ever seen on reality television.

Call me crazy for expecting a kid who drove a scissor-door Lambo to live in a sixties sitcom-style house, but I'd been expecting white picket fences, a tire swing, a stay-at-home mom-in-apron and dad who shouted, "Honey, I'm home!"

Really, whatever fantasies I could have dreamed up wouldn't have prepared me for Sasuke's reality. "You _live_ here?" I squeaked, as he pulled up to an unbelievable front-lit Victorian manor house. He drove up the mile-long driveway, past manicured hedges and an imposing palatial gateway. A few well-placed spotlights cast halos of white light across the front-facing side of the manor, illuminating half a dozen stone chimneys, bay windows, and majestic archways.

It's not as if the house I'd just moved into was slim pickens, but the Uchiha residence definitely overwhelmed my mom's three-bedroom Dutch Colonial Revival. I had a feeling even Ino's house probably wasn't this huge—not _nearly_ this regal.

I was just resisting the urge to ask him if his parents owned the _city, _too, when Sasuke got the door for me and helped me out of the cab.

"You could have some really awesome house parties here," I mused—my half-assed attempt at conversation. I felt his hand close gently on my elbow, guiding my steps when I stumbled blindly over bare feet, rocks and gravel biting deep into the flesh of my soles.

"Yeah, invite a couple hundred delinquents to break my mom's diamond-cut crystal, steal my dad's good Scotch and drop acid in my bathroom," Sasuke muttered, rolling granite-black eyes. In the moonlight, they seemed to glimmer, as though flecked with diamonds.

He led me through the grass over dewy, wet blades, emerald green even in the darkness. Nothing seemed normal about accompanying him up the walk path to his gargantuan house, wearing his really expensive designer clothing. Not more than a week earlier, I would have resented him for his exceeding wealth. All I felt now was a strengthened sense of consociation.

Really, _the _legendary Uchiha Sasuke was letting me into this small aspect of his personal life. Had _anyone_ seen this coming?

I may have been a bit presumptuous, expecting a butler to greet us at the door, but it was trifles such as Sasuke actually owning his own house key that made him so much more approachable to me.

He let me in, and the inside of the house was largely submersed in impenetrable darkness. We walked through one dimly chandelier-lit hallway—a corridor to an open area that I could only guess served as a living space. There were plush sofas, loveseats and silken throw pillows; glass, marble and mahogany table tops supported expensive gold-gilded frames with a select few family photos, and modern art, portraits, and bridal blueprints decorated the bare spaces on the walls. It was impressive—there was no question. But for the most part, the room looked largely unused—nonfunctional at best—just the decorative façade of the typical family home.

Incidentally, it wasn't what Sasuke wanted me to see. He led me further into the house, down another corridor with half a dozen redwood doors on either side. I was baffled by the number of rooms we passed, but Sasuke didn't hesitate at all—he walked knowingly through the maze that was his home and stopped outside what looked to be a home theatre.

I went inside, and that was when he gave me the most _chilling _cursory onceover. "I'm going to get you something to wear," Sasuke told me—didn't even really ask. "That looks big on you. And maybe you ought to use the bath. There's sand in your hair, and you smell like booze." Short. Blunt. _Harsh_.

I balked at the mental image of how I must have looked to him, disheveled and worse for wear. The way the whole side of my face burned when I smiled, frowned—even _blinked_—made me think that Ino had done some considerable damage with her nails, and I became hyperaware of the fact that I had _no _idea what I looked like. I hadn't even seen a mirror since the beach house.

"Yes, please," I eventually conceded, at least able to admit that Sasuke was right when he was right. I felt bashful under his scrutiny, but he reached out with a hand, gently tousling my hair. The action further snarled my pink locks, but he looked at me then, pearly white pirate smile and all, and it chased away any infuriated notions of being patronized by the denigrating gesture.

Instead, all I felt was a strong—perhaps unfounded—adulation for him.

He assured me that it was for the best if I was so interested in throwing my mother off the trail, and on second thought, there was no way in hell I could argue with _that_.

* * *

Sasuke returned with a shirt and pair of boy's jeans.

Both I knew had come from his closet, just by the cut and wash of the denim, as well as the familiar V-neck style of the shirt. For all of his richness, Sasuke could have easily shopped for his shirts in bulk at the local grocery mart—just another one of those things that made the prosperous prodigy so much more human than originally met the eye.

"You can wear these," he told me, matter-of-factly, and set them down on the bathroom counter. Beside them, a clean towel—pink, I mused—and a matching washcloth. "Use whatever you need. I don't really care. This is a guest bathroom anyway."

I nodded then, trying to quash my secret envy. Sasuke had referred to it as _a _guest bathroom, not _the _guest bathroom—with its luxury jet bathtub, black granite countertops, glass shower, porcelain appliances and more. I could have _lived_ in this bathroom for the rest of my life, ideally just as well. From the outside, the house looked big enough to put up at least a half a dozen families, so it shouldn't have surprised me that he had more full baths than my mom's house had bedrooms.

I could hardly wait to get naked in it.

"I don't really know where to get that intimate stuff, like panties or whatever," Sasuke continued, hangdog when he glanced at me. From the little I'd heard, Mikoto—Sasuke's mother—was the only woman to the Uchiha family name. He reached behind his back and tossed a pair of boxers atop everything else he'd given me. _No further explanation necessary_, his facial expression seemed to say, and I suppressed laughter when his features quickly deadpanned.

I didn't waste too much time, shutting the door behind him and commencing with a hurried shower—enough to wash the essentials, though I may have lingered a minute longer than necessary to massage the high-end spa shampoo into my scalp.

When in Rome, yeah?

I dressed in all of the things Sasuke had given me—really comfy cotton boxer briefs (that almost ruined me for panties forever) and his jeans, large and shapeless, that somehow managed to fit better than his khakis. The thin blue V-neck was like the ones I'd seen him wear to school, but it fell below my waistline, clinging like static to the curves of my breasts. Oh yeah, I was the epitome of sexy.

Bring on the bitches, right?

Despite my economy speed in his first class shower, of course Sasuke still washed, cleaned, and finished before I did. I found him seated in the theatre, long, muscular arms stretched out along the back of an overstuffed leather sofa.

I dropped down beside him, luxuriating in the smell of his body wash, and I wondered if my scent was also so strong. "What are we watching?" I mumbled, carefully—tiredly—tucking myself against his side.

He let me pick—some unremarkable film with a name I don't remember.

It wouldn't have mattered if the film had been remarkable, anyway, because we'd forgotten completely about it. Save for the fact that we had no desire to watch it—that we could be doing a million other things more intriguing _than_ watching it—and that we _were_ doing those million other things as he kissed me, laid me down, and commenced with a thorough exploration of my body.

Before you ask, evidently Sasuke's parents live an awfully itinerant lifestyle, rich moguls that they are.

Fugaku, Sasuke's father, holds some kind of senator-type position… I still don't exactly know what he does—Sasuke doesn't talk about him much—but his fingers are knuckle-deep in all of Konoha's well-heeled pies. What I _do_ know is that he spends a lot of time between his upstate office and five-star hotels, otherwise the epitomic traveling capitalist—Uchiha Fugaku: investor extraordinaire.

Mikoto, on the other hand, keeps a deliberate distance between herself and her husband's world of corporate politics. She finds herself in the heart of any fashionista's couture fantasy, overseas two to three seasons out of every year. A leading high-end designer with a reputation that precedes her for her stunning designs in bridal fashion, she's home usually in the summer and fall, and it's surprising how much of a housewife Mikoto can be when she's not behind a sewing machine or managing a runway show.

Interestingly enough, Sasuke has a brother, too—Itachi, five years his senior—who lives in a penthouse apartment near Konoha University.

Long story short, the high school quarterback has a lot of time, and a _lot_ of property, all to himself. While he _does _have a cleaning staff that pays biweekly visits to the estate, he does _not_, in fact,have a butler.

Anyway.

His hands found the fly of my, erm, _his_ jeans—the ones _I_ was wearing, not him—and he tugged them from my legs, one agonizing inch at a time. Dressed in his boxers and clingy tee-shirt, I felt like I was at a sexy sleepover, probably the least seductive I've _ever_ felt, even though there was no denying the concrete evidence of his desire for me, a solid weight in my right hand.

He loomed over me, our hips so achingly far apart that even arching our chests together didn't satisfy the urge for contact.

I could feel the rough denim of his jeans on my legs where we mingled and twisted together, and when I surreptitiously angled a knee between his thighs, squeezed him in my palm, he hissed, sinking his teeth into my shoulder.

"I've been waiting to take advantage of you again," I teased, and he growled against my skin, resuming a trail of indulgent kisses along the side of my neck and down.

His hands had found their ways into the confines of my borrowed shirt, his ambitions easily assisted by my lack of a bra. For the second time that night, I was twisting beneath him, even more so when a hand strayed to briskly brush me through the thin cotton of the boxer briefs. I hissed back, completely thrown by the unexpected contact, and Sasuke stiffened when my fingers instinctively tightened around his erection.

"Not allowed?" he cautioned, and the way he spoke so tentatively about sexual boundaries with his dick in my hand made me roll my eyes, despite myself. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and mocked him with a contemplative sound.

"I'll allow it," I answered, in a lofty you-are-my-sex-slave tone of voice that didn't entirely have any relevance to the situation. He laughed a bit—me, too, awkwardly—but it was obvious that we were stalling.

I blew out a sigh when I felt him touch me through the briefs again, letting the gentle puff grow into tiny whimpers, then a full-on groan.

"Oh yeah, I'll allow it," I breathed, arching into the sweet ache.

He cupped the juncture between my legs, one finger stroking skillfully along the contours of my sex, and I gripped him more tightly, mirroring his motions. When he brushed a kiss across my lips, wet and heated, I lost my focus long enough to fail to notice how his hand had splayed flat against the planes of my stomach, then slipped palm-down beneath the waistband of the boxer briefs.

It wasn't until I felt the rough pressure of a calloused finger on my clit that my eyes snapped open, and I clenched him again.

"_Fuck_, Sasuke," I hissed, and his lips, which had moved to my neck, pressed a pirate smirk into my skin.

I pulled harder on his erection, hearing something of a sigh escape him where his face buried itself deep in the cover of my hair. Above me, Sasuke's breath was warm on my neck—moist—and his hand between my legs explored me generously, even after he came.

I was on the brink of an orgasm, I think, with two of his fingers curling in come-hither motions against the inside of my core, when I heard the footsteps in the hallway. One hand knotted in Sasuke's hair, the other raking scratch marks down his back, his body was trapped so tight against mine that I could look over his shoulder at the television—see the credits rolling and confirm that the footsteps had been real, not just television background noise.

"Sasuke," I warned, but my breath hitched when his fingers delved deep. After one night, he was already playing my body like a well-rehearsed overture. "I think someone is… Someone is…is… Ah, fuck—Sasuke!"

My whole body convulsed beneath him, pulling hair, digging in, legs gripping his waist like a vice. I pulsed and tingled and clenched around his fingers, my head lolling drearily on the soft leather of the big sofa as his lips pressed kisses to my collarbones. There was so much space that we could have been in a bed, and it was a wonder that we hadn't moved to one with how close to naked we both were. Sasuke had peeled his shirt off, and his jeans had come off, too. I was in a V-neck and absolutely _nothing_ else.

"Damn, how much are you going to pay me _not _to tell Mom and Dad about this?"

I would have flushed and covered myself if I'd been less drunk—less _enthralled_, even—so as it was, I only managed to loll my head in the direction of Itachi's voice. I recognized him from the pictures, half-lidded eyes taking in the sight of the elder Uchiha.

Delirious as I was, I thought for a split second that there might have been _two _of Sasuke. Itachi's face might have held the telltale mature bone structure, maybe even a slight five o' clock shadow, but his long black hair, pulled back in a low ponytail, was the only defining feature that set him immediately apart from his younger brother. The Uchiha family resemblance was _uncanny_.

Even more, the seductive pirate smile that lit Itachi's face was nearly identical to the one I'd seen on Sasuke.

Interestingly enough, when I looked at him, he wasn't smiling. "I'll pay you to _get out_," Sasuke snarled, balling up his tee-shirt and tossing it at his older brother's head.

Itachi deflected the shirt, batting it aside. "Wait, let's talk about this," he mused, face lighting up in a predatory, wolfish grin. "I come home to visit, and all you can do is toss your laundry at me?"

He deflected his younger brother's jeans next, and they fell to the floor in a crumpled heap. "Bad timing, _idiot_," Sasuke growled, reaching for the second pair of pants.

"Now hold on—!" Itachi protested, ducking behind the open doorway as Sasuke's jeans went sailing. I couldn't see him, but his voice, thick with barely suppressed, mocking laughter, filled the room whenever he spoke. "I won't tell—I won't tell! I'm just saying, try the bedroomnext time. People still _live_ here, you know—hard as that is to believe."

I felt Sasuke's face grow warm where he'd pressed it flush against my neck. The back of the big couch was a scrim that hid our half-nakedness, and I was grateful for it, as Sasuke's fingers had yet to pull out of me. That low rumble manifested and built in the depths of his chest, burning to the surface like a wildfire in a field of straw, dead leaves, and tinder.

"Hey, Sak, you _tired_?" Sasuke suddenly asked, and it sounded forced to me, the way he gritted it through his teeth.

His optimism was forced. His willingness, as he let go of me, was forced. He was humoring his brother, and defusing the really inappropriate, awkward situation as painlessly as possible. Even still, it was like pulling teeth.

I glanced between Sasuke and what little I could see of Itachi, peeking out from behind the doorframe.

I slowly nodded that, indeed, I was pretty tired, and I didn't miss the irritated twitch in Sasuke's jaw as he rose up and off me, exposing my slick wet thighs to the cool breeze that flushed through the room.

"Thank God. We're getting out of here."

* * *

"Thanks for taking me to the hospital," I murmured, struggling against heavy eyelids as Sasuke patiently chauffeured me home. "And paying the bill for my stitches… And thanks for letting me make out with you on your couch and wear your underwear…sorry about that last bit though…when your brother walked in on us." He grunted then, an irritated sound that I pretended not to hear. "And thanks for letting me make you—" I giggled. "—well, you know, you were there. And…beating up that creep who pulled my hair and…yuck, licked my ear." I screwed up my face and grimaced. "Sounds like really kinky porn, doesn't it."

Despite whatever irritation Sasuke still harbored from an interrupted night of raging hormones and unresolved sexual tension, he laughed imperceptibly softly, the lights from the dashboard chasing some of the shadows from his face. "Thanks for letting me break that idiot's nose in your name," he countered. "Thanks for letting me experience the _surrealism_ of actually getting to touch you, against all odds, and letting me feel like someone can actually depend on me for something."

He turned towards me with that trademark Uchiha pirate smile. "Does it sound so kinky when I put it that way?"

I breathed a sigh and shook my head. "Hardly, but that's a little sentimental for _the_ Uchiha Sasuke, isn't it?"

He raised an eyebrow, seeming to mull that over before lifting his shoulder in a flippant shrug. "Yeah, kind of," he agreed, and I laughed, lips curling up in a half-smile when he pulled up to my house.

He walked me to the door and saw me safely inside, little more than a muttered "see you around," before he got back in his car and drove into the night. I'd trudged on unsteady, leaden feet up a creaky flight of stairs, and in spite of being fully dressed, I fell asleep before my head even hit my pillow.

No way in hell Mom would be able to wake me up in the morning.

* * *

**A/N: Questions and comments are always welcome! ;D Hint: I give spoilers to readers who leave me helpful reviews (i.e. tell me the kinds of things you hope to see happen in future chapters, etc.). Remember, I write this story for _you_ just as much as for myself! As always, thanks for your continued readership and support. Chapter 7 and 8 are already being revised, so they should be posted sooner rather than later. Have a great day/night!**


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